


Frozen Into Marble

by bomberqueen17



Series: Two-Body Problem [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Misunderstanding, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-30
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2017-12-30 22:12:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 46,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Continuation from Thawing From The Inside. This picks up at the beginning of Season 2 and goes from there.<br/>TTFI was fundamentally a hopeful story; this one is a bit less sweet. No explicit Rodney/anybody else, but some Pining John here and there. After all, McKay's apparently still holding out hope for the white picket fence and wife and kids.<br/> </p>
<p>"O fie upon this single life. Forgo it.<br/>We read how Daphne, for her peevish flight,<br/>Became a fruitless bay-tree; Syrinx turned<br/>To the pale empty reed; Anaxarete<br/>Was frozen into marble: whereas those<br/>Which married, or proved kind unto their friends,<br/>Were, by a gracious influence, transshaped<br/>Into the olive, pomegranate, mulberry:<br/>Became flowers, precious stones, or eminent stars.”<br/>Antonio (3.2.24-32)<br/>(The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Powerful Enemies

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 1 picks up immediately after the end of S2ep1.

 

“Beckett,” John said, a little breathlessly, leaning on the doorframe of the infirmary. Beckett leapt in the air, clutching at his chest. 

“Jesus,” he said, “Major, you startled me.”

“Sorry,” John said, a bit impatient— he’d just run here, if Beckett couldn’t hear _running feet_ in _combat boots_ the man was fucking _deaf_. Though ok, the last Wraith in the base had died a matter of hours ago, and Beckett had probably not slept any more than John had. “I gotta talk to you.”

“Are you injured?” Beckett asked, recovering, and standing up with a concerned look. 

“No, no no,” John said, “no, I just— listen—“ 

“You look like there’s a ghost chasin’ you,” Beckett said. “What has you in such a tizzy?”

“They’re sending me back to Earth,” John said. “Reviewing everything.”

“Aye,” Beckett said, “they talked to me, they’re reviewing a lot of things. I wouldn’t worry, son, it’s only to be expected after a year out of contact.”

“I know,” John said. “Listen—“

“You have nothing to worry about,” Beckett said, beaming. “You’ve done a fine job here. More than fine.”

“That’s not my issue,” John said, exasperated. He came in and thought the door shut behind him. “My medical records.”

“What about them?” Beckett asked. 

“The PTSD,” John hissed. “I only talked to you about that because I figured it’d never get back to Earth.”

“Och,” Beckett said, “it’s so typical, though. If I thought it made you incapable of doing this job, I’d have said so to your face, lad.”

“It doesn’t matter what _you_ think,” John said, despairing. 

“It most certainly does,” Beckett said, frowning. 

“You don’t understand,” John said, desperate now. “They’ve been looking for something— Carson, they’ll have me out on my ass for it. Anything. They’ll use any excuse. A positive PTSD diagnosis— Jesus Christ, Carson, why do you think I’ve been swallowing this shit down for twenty fucking years?”

“Getting treatment for something isn’t an admission of weakness,” Beckett said, frowning even deeper. 

John sagged into a chair, every one of the thirty-six hours he’d been awake putting pounds of pressure on his shoulders. “Beckett,” he said, letting his voice crack out his exhaustion, “we’re talking about the US Military. They sent me here to get rid of me, when they thought it was a one-way trip. Now that it’s a success? They won’t send me back here. Where else can they send me? With my record, and PTSD on top of that— next stop is flying a desk, Doc, and if they can get me to go totally crazy they’ll have me out on my ass with a medical discharge.”

“John,” Beckett said, his voice gentle. John didn’t look up at him. Everything had a kind of hazy, shaky quality, vibrating slightly and at a great distance. “John, I don’t think there’s anyone here who doesn’t have some kind of PTSD— and what’s more, some kind of notation of it in their file. I promise you, there’s nothing exceptional in your file.”

“It doesn’t matter what I look like relative to the others here,” John said. “It’s never mattered, Beckett. Can’t you just— remove that part?”

“Son, your medical records are confidential,” Beckett said. 

“Not to the review board,” John said, hollow with despair. Oh, sure, he’d just beaten the most ridiculous odds and won the hardest battle of his life, but he knew it was nothing compared to what he was about to face. Beckett was staring at him. “Not to the review board,” he repeated. “They see everything. Privacy only applies to civilians.”

Beckett stared at him for a long moment. “Major,” he said quietly, “I am quite sure you have nothing to worry about. I didn’t put anything in there I thought would harm you. I only put in things I thought any physician treating you should know about. That’s all. There’s nothing damning.”

“But it does mention it,” John said. 

“Yes,” Beckett admitted. “Some of the sleeping pills and the like I gave you were controlled substances, so I noted the reason in your chart.”

“And you can’t…” John paused, looking at Beckett’s face. “Edit that.”

“No, I can’t,” Beckett said. “And you know, for anyone but you, I wouldn’t even consider it, but it’s true: I can’t. The software we use contains revision histories so you can see what’s been changed. Even if I purged all mentions of the diagnosis, they could see that I’d removed them. It would only be more suspicious.”

John let his eyes go unfocused a moment, then nodded, closing them and looking down as he gathered his strength to get up. 

“Get some sleep, John,” Beckett said gently. “If all that you’ve accomplished here isn’t enough, going into it frazzled and exhausted certainly won’t help.”

John pushed himself to his feet, chewing on his lips. The insides were raw by now, these last few days having taken their toll. He frowned. “Got any antacids handy?” he asked. He’d gone through his entire stash. 

“I think I have,” Carson said, rooting around. He beamed up at John for a moment. “We can get resupplied now,” he said, blissful. “We don’t have to mend and make do. We can get real toothpaste again! And I don’t have to hoard these!”

The little packet he gave John was a name-brand drugstore antacid. John raised his eyebrows, impressed; they’d been making their own, semi-unsuccessfully. He was kind of used to the way the chalky pills fell apart and had to be poured out of the waxed-paper packaging. And he was also kind of used to the way they only worked for an hour or so. But it meant he went through them at such a rate that it was actually impossible for him to carry enough not to run out.

“You’re right,” John said, digging up a smile for Beckett. It wasn’t Beckett’s fault, the man was just doing his job, and of course he had no idea what the Air Force was like, administratively. He cadged a glass of water from the tap by Beckett’s office, got a couple of the pills down, and managed to give Beckett a creditably cheerful farewell. 

 

Heightmayer was next. She wasn’t in her office, she was in her quarters, and John hesitated, chewing intermittently-bloody lips, but desperation drove him on. 

She opened the door fairly briskly; she was in a fluffy bathrobe, her hair put up loosely and no makeup on her face. “Sorry,” John said; she looked ready for bed. 

“Oh,” she said, “I wasn’t asleep— Major, is something wrong?”

“No,” he said, “no, er— well, yes, but not urgently. I just—“

“Come in,” she said, and shut the door behind him. “I assume it’s confidential.”

“That’s the issue,” John said. “I’ll be blunt. Medical records of military personnel aren’t confidential. They’re sending me back to Earth. While the wormhole’s open for the databurst, a couple of us will be going back, and they’re going to review everything. Everything, Doc. Especially me.” 

“You’ve done an amazing job here, Major,” Dr. Heightmayer said, smiling sweetly, wide-eyed sincere. It had gotten John through many long sessions, trying to figure out how much of that sincerity was genuine and how much was put on. In conversation, though, it mostly just put him off. 

“Maybe,” John said. “They don’t really care, though. There are like three things they’re going to look at, and my medical records are one of them, and they’re going to see a PTSD diagnosis and relegate me to flying a desk until I completely lose the rest of my mind and they can medically discharge me.”

“Major Sheppard,” Heightmayer said, dismayed but obviously not at the right thing, “they’ll do no such thing. Your case is relatively mild. That level of psychological impact is completely routine.”

“They don’t care,” John said. “I’ve seen pilots grounded for less. And maybe some people would be grateful for the reprieve but I can’t live like that, Doc.” Heightmayer started to speak and he cut her off. “I didn’t come here for reassurances,” he said, “and I’m sorry if I’m being rude, I just don’t have much time. They’ll never let me come back here, Doc, they’re gonna shove me into a lab at Area 51 to play human lightswitch until something blows me up. You gotta help me, you gotta take that shit outta my file. I never would have ever fuckin’ opened my mouth if I’d ever really thought we were gonna see Earth again.”

Heightmayer stared at him and John was uncomfortably aware that he probably sounded unhinged. “I’ve never heard you so upset,” she said finally. “John, sit down.” It was a bad sign that she was using his name. Carson had too. That’s what it took? Great, she was trying to talk him down. She thought he was nuts.

“I don’t have time,” he said, trying to stuff it all back in. “I have to— Look, can you help me or not?” 

“I can help you,” Heightmayer said, “but not the way you’re asking. I assure you, I don’t put incriminating or personal things in people’s files.”

“Then you can’t help me,” John said. “I know the diagnosis is in there. And I know they’ll consider it enough.” He shook his head wearily and turned back to the door. 

“Major,” Heightmayer said, sounding genuinely distressed. 

He shook his head again. “I never breathed a word of that to _anyone_ before,” he said quietly, risking a look back at her. “And I never would’ve told you either, but it seemed so…” He laughed bitterly. “Safe. Like I was finally far enough away from the people who’d rather see me out of the Air Force to let down my guard for a second.” 

“Major,” she said again, more composed, more sympathetic, “it won’t—“

John opened the door. “I guess it’s a damn good thing I never told you about the suicidal ideation,” he said nastily, stepping through and thinking the door shut after himself with extra force. Not as satisfying as a slam, but close. It was probably too late for her to put that tidbit in. Well, it would just be the icing if she did; the cake was already baked. 

 

He rang Rodney’s door chime four or five times, then checked the life signs detector to ensure Rodney was really in there. He was, a stationary blinking dot in the spot where his bed was. Probably passed the fuck out, and deservedly so. John leaned against the wall for a long moment, wishing he could just go to bed and stop chasing this down. But he couldn’t sleep, not if it meant missing his last couple of hours in Atlantis. And not if it meant abandoning his last forlorn hope of getting posted back here. 

He finally just opened the door, which Rodney might have locked, but it never stuck if it was locked against him. John could always just walk in, and almost never did. Now was surely the time for it, though. 

Rodney was passed out across his bed, sprawled on his face, wearing his jacket but no pants, just boxers. John was too distraught even to notice his ass. 

He sat heavily in the chair and wheeled it over to the bed. “Hey,” he said softly. No response. “Hey,” he repeated, and reached out to touch Rodney’s arm. Yeah, the guy deserved to sleep, but there was also no way they were gonna reassign Rodney, not after all he’d done— and besides, nobody back at the SGC wanted to work with him. John had picked up on that much. Even though this was a peachy assignment now, they still weren’t gonna keep McKay on Earth. They’d already learned that it wasn’t even worth it to keep him around as a punching bag; he was far too sharp for that, in more ways than one. So his position here was guaranteed. 

Christ, John hadn’t even really thought about that. Not only to lose Atlantis, but to lose McKay was kind of an extra little gut-punch. Oh, John had a few friends left, that weren’t dead, but he’d never had anybody like Rodney. Maybe if he was stuck back on Earth there might be such a thing as a dating pool again, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath for a peachy job posting that’d give him time or opportunity for a social life. 

Though, even if he got posted back here, he still couldn’t have Rodney— not like he had been, not with so little worry or care. He hadn’t been blatant, but he hadn’t worried too hard about hiding it, because who cared? But now, with martinets like Everett likely to show up at a second’s notice to throw all their ad-hoc survival rules out the window, he couldn’t be so cavalier. But at least being here, at least being in the same galaxy, at least _knowing Rodney was alive_ , would be a lot better than any alternative.

“C’mon,” John said, trying hard not to whine, “Rodney, I need you.”

“Mfrmm,” Rodney said, wriggling his face deeper into the pillows. 

“McKay,” John said. “C’mon. Wake up.” He grabbed Rodney’s shoulder.

“Bzuh,” Rodney said, shoving himself up abruptly on an elbow and looking around wildly. “Whumpf. Huzzat.” His eyes weren’t pointing the same direction. “Shphrd.”

It was close enough to a sign of consciousness. “Yeah,” John said. “It’s me. I need your help.”

Rodney flipped himself over and sat up, listing badly to one side and rubbing at his face. “World’s ending,” he said blurrily. “I fix it. Gimme sec.”

John felt guilty as hell now, but this was important. “I’m really sorry to wake you up,” he said. 

Rodney blinked at him, peeling his eyes wide. “Whazit,” he said. 

“We’re not under attack,” John said. 

Rodney slumped. “Then what?” he asked plaintively. 

“You’ve gotta help me,” John said, which normally Rodney would’ve laughed at, but instead his face twisted and he looked upset and concerned. 

“What is it?” he asked. 

John held his hands together, palms flat, tips of his fingers a couple of inches away from his chin, pressed in hard so they wouldn’t shake. “My medical records,” he said. 

Rodney blinked at him in stark incomprehension. 

“Remember how proud of me you were for actually telling the doctor about the PTSD after I punched you in the face and threw up and almost flew the jumper into unmarked deep space?” John asked. 

“Yeah,” Rodney said, still blank. 

“That’s in my records now,” John said fiercely. “Of course Carson and Heightmeyer fucking wrote it down. And they’re gonna send my medical records back in the databurst tomorrow morning. And they fucking _ground_ pilots who get PTSD. They sure as hell won’t send me back here.”

“Sheppard,” Rodney said, frowning, “they’d be stupid not to, whatever the hell your medical records say.”

John shook his head. “They sent me here to get rid of me when they thought it was gonna be a one-way deal,” he said. “Now it’s not, now there’s political cachet. I’m out on my ass, and PTSD is a perfect excuse for them to get it done.”

Rodney blinked. “Really?” He was, after all, a genius. It figured he’d see it before the others did. Everyone else had, over the last year, fallen into the same tribe/family mentality, but John knew what that was like, he’d been in enough forward positions to know how fragile that illusion was. Yeah, when you needed help, you were all alone, but the pencil-pushers always caught up eventually, and they didn’t give a damn about how important the things you’d done to survive were to you. They’d change everything for political expediency or easier bookkeeping, and hell with the stuff you’d paid for in blood.

“Yeah,” John said. “Depending what the docs wrote in there, it may or may not be enough to let them give me a medical discharge. Regardless, though, it’s gonna be plenty for them to have an excuse not to send me back.” He paused to laugh bitterly. “Well, on top of all the shit I know Elizabeth documented, where we disagreed and she was wrong and I was right but it still matters that we disagreed because of my capital-R Reputation.”

“Fuck,” Rodney said, “really?”

“Yes, really,” John said, more patient than he’d been able to be with the doctors. 

Rodney shook his head, then looked up. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Hack in and screw up the file,” John said. “I don’t care if you can be neat about it, just get it outta there.” 

“I can’t do that,” Rodney squawked. 

“You’re Rodney McKay,” John yelled back, flailing his arms. “You can do anything!”

“You’re right,” Rodney said, preening for a microsecond, “but I can’t do this! I can’t get into people’s medical records.” 

“Of course you can,” John said. “I know for a fucking fact you’ve been in my file before.”

“I certainly have not!” Rodney said, drawing himself up with enough indignation that it was easy for John to spot the tiny sideways darting motion of Rodney’s eyes— guilt. 

“Oh, yes you have,” John said. “You fucking _admitted_ it, don’t lie to me! I was drugged at the time, not a moron.” 

“I,” Rodney said, “I never,” and then deflated. “That was read-only,” he admitted. “I couldn’t make any changes. And Grodin caught me at it and fixed it so I can’t anymore.” 

They both sat still a moment, both gut-shot by the mention of Grodin. 

“God,” John said finally, when he could speak. “Maybe I deserve to get grounded.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you that there isn’t with the rest of us,” Rodney said, plaintive. “Except right now maybe you sound a little paranoid. Kinda worked-up. But actually I’m _usually_ like that and nobody seems to mind.”

John shook his head, staring blankly at the floor. This was it. This was what total defeat felt like. He had nothing. And he was going to go face those assholes and see their eyes, see the smug pity. _Poor sap can’t handle the pressure,_ they’d snigger to one another, and they’d convince themselves they were doing him a favor as they condemned him to die by his own hand in some god-awful bachelor officer’s quarters in the middle of fucking nowhere after he couldn’t keep his nose to the desk-jockey grindstone anymore. 

Jesus Christ, maybe he really _was_ crazy.

“Hey,” Rodney said, punching him _hard_ in the arm. “I’m not speaking to you, you asshole.”

John thought about getting mad at how hard Rodney’d punched him, but didn’t have the energy. He didn’t even look up. “Why?” he asked. 

“You tried to fucking kill yourself with the fucking bomb _I built_ ,” Rodney said. “Do you have any idea what that would’ve done to me?” 

“Kept you alive for at least another hour?” John guessed dully. “Given you time to come up with a better plan for the second hive?”

“No, you asshole,” Rodney said. “Couldn’t you have given me five more minutes to come up with something else instead of fucking committing suicide?”

“We didn’t have five minutes, Rodney,” John said. “Anyway it didn’t happen, so what’s your problem?”

“What’s my _problem_?” Rodney shrieked. Wow, a full-on freakout. It was amazing the guy had the energy for it, after the week or month or year or so they’d just had. Though John should talk, he’d just come unglued at both his primary care physician and his shrink. _Good going, John,_ he thought. _They_ totally _think you’re not crazy now._ “What’s _my_ problem? Jesus fucking Christ, Sheppard, the only reason you didn’t die was a one in a million coincidence crazy wild chance. Were you trying to fucking die in the most traumatic-to-me way possible, or what?”

“It’s my fucking _job_ ,” John said, and pushed himself to his feet, wobbling alarmingly. “That others may fucking _live_ , Rodney, it’s right in the goddamn fucking _job description_.” That was it, that had been his last chance, and it was a forlorn hope anyway. John shivered; the hollow feeling was resolving into cold. He hadn’t eaten in far too long, hadn’t slept, and now he had nothing keeping him going. 

“That’s asinine,” Rodney said. “That’s just asinine, Sheppard. Only the military—“

“Scientists do it too,” John said. “Fucking Grodin fucking did it. It’s the Cold Equations, Rodney. It’s fucking _logic_.” 

“I hated that story,” Rodney said, quiet and miserable. “It might have been good literature but it was lousy engineering.”

John’s teeth chattered. “Whatever,” he said, and turned, stumbling over a discarded shoe on the floor. He caught himself with difficulty, and leaned on the desk a moment. “So you can’t help me either.”

“God,” Rodney said, exasperated. “No, I can’t.” He waved a hand, mouth twisting bitterly. “Maybe it’s better this way. You won’t have nearly so many opportunities to commit fucking _suicide_ if you’re back on Earth.”

“Ha,” John said, standing up and going to the door. He stood there a moment, not turning, speaking to the wall. “You know what the attrition rate is for combat rescue officers in Afghanistan? I got this thing where I survive suicide missions, but I’m not stupid, McKay, I know that won’t last forever. Back on Earth, when my luck runs out it’ll be for the benefit of fucking Halliburton, not saving Earth from life-sucking aliens. So think about that.” 

He swiped the door open, glanced back over his shoulder. “So long, Rodney,” he said bitterly, and thought the door shut behind him. 

 

It took Rodney almost an hour to track him down, mostly because John had stolen the life signs detector Rodney always hoarded. 

“You fucking _asshole_ ,” Rodney said without preamble, sitting down heavily next to him on the pier. The North Pier was a bit battle-scarred, but John had a P90 with him and the lifesigns detector and could testify that at least there were no Wraith out here. 

“Yeah, yeah,” John said glumly, staring across at the Northwest Pier, mostly dark but glittering across the water. Neither of them said anything for a while. 

“They won’t send you back to Afghanistan,” Rodney said. “You have the gene. They need you.”

“You know I won’t survive Area 51 very long either,” John said. 

“ _I_ did,” Rodney said. 

“That’s because you don’t know what it’s like to fly a helicopter,” John said. “And because you got to do something you’re good at while you were there. You remember how much I loved playing human lightswitch for you in Antarctica?”

Rodney snorted. “I’m amazed either one of us survived that,” he said. 

“Yeah,” John said, only he wasn’t going to laugh too. Silence stretched a moment. 

“I tried,” Rodney said at last. “The databurst is already compressed. I can’t make any changes to any of the files; I’d have to extract it, find what was needed, and re-compress it, and there just isn’t physically time for that, even if I found it nearly instantly.”

John squashed his impulse to hesitate and instead put his hand on Rodney’s. Rodney’s hand was so much warmer than his it was almost painful. “Thanks,” he said, almost-whispering. 

“C’mon,” Rodney said. “We gotta get some rest before we head out. I’ll be the big spoon.”

John bit his lip, stubborn instinct telling him to push back, but eventually he pulled his teeth back out of the tattered flesh there and said, “Okay.”

 

 

“God, John,” Elizabeth said, “I know this is usually your line, but didn’t you sleep at all?”

John blinked at her. He’d shaved, at least, and combed his hair. “I got a couple hours,” he said. 

“Too excited?” she asked, bouncing in place a little bit. 

He raised an eyebrow. “Somethin’ like that.”

She frowned at him. “You look like this is a death sentence, not a chance to return to your native planet after a year of thinking you were cut off forever.”

John gave her a wan smile. “Wonderin’ what my reception’ll be like,” he said. 

“I expect they’ll give you some sort of medal,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve already written up a report I intend to send to the President myself.”

John looked down, unexpectedly touched. “Means a lot,” he said. “That’s real sweet of you.”

Elizabeth sounded surprised. “Of course,” she said. “I have a lot of those kinds of reports written up.”

“Oh,” John said, “so do I. I sent a whole batch of ‘em with our first report back, when we did that databurst? I sent all my paperwork, including recommendations for promotions and awards and medals and stuff.” He scuffed his feet, working himself up to look over at her. “It’s nice that you did that for me, though.” 

“Of course I did,” she said. She still looked surprised. “Why wouldn’t I?”

He looked back down at his feet. “It’s a while since anybody cared about my service record except the bad parts,” he said. 

“What do you mean?” she asked. “You have all kinds of awards.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I used to be pretty hot shit.” He scratched the back of his head. “None of that counts, though.”

“Of course it does,” Elizabeth said.

John shrugged. “Sure,” he said. He was so nervous he was nauseated, and speaking was difficult. He looked down at his feet again. 

“Major Sheppard,” Elizabeth said, “you’ve done an exceptional job this last year. I counted at least four different actions that, back on Earth, would have merited you a Congressional Medal of Honor. I don’t understand what you’re nervous about.”

“Those are all politics,” John said, before he could stop himself. “I mean— Elizabeth, I was just doin’ a job. It’s okay. I’m just hoping they post me back here, is all.”

“They will,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t worry about that.”

“Oh,” John said, dredging up a smile for her, “I won’t worry about a thing.”

 

 

 

 

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, Sheppard,” Rodney was moaning as he came. For once, John wasn’t worried about the noise; the hotel walls were thin but nobody here knew who they were or gave a fuck. He’d just come his brains out with Rodney’s thick hard cock nailing him to the mattress and his big hand jacking John’s cock perfectly, and he lay throbbing with sated arousal and every pleasant hormone the body knew how to release as Rodney shuddered to stillness, still buried deep in him. 

Rodney collapsed, still trembling, on his chest, and John wrapped his arms around him and held on. His mind had been blissfully blank through most of the encounter, but now he was doing the dangerous emotions thing, all of the terror and fear and hurt and betrayal and tearing grief of the last few days coming back to fill the hollow place in his chest, overlaid with a shaky wave of desperate, overwhelming affection, need, love. Rodney was heavy, holding him down so he didn’t shake apart. 

This was goodbye. This was it. No more of this. No more McKay. No more Atlantis. No more Weir. No chance to say goodbye to Teyla. No chance to keep his promises to Ford. No chance to close off any of his loose ends. It hurt, more than John knew he’d been able to feel, a big tearing hole inside his ribs that felt like a ship venting atmosphere. 

So he held on, Rodney’s face shoved in the spot between his neck and shoulder, Rodney’s broad shoulders covering him, his legs still wrapped around Rodney’s waist, Rodney’s breath hot and warm snuffling in his ear. 

Eventually Rodney lifted his head. “Jesus,” he said. “I think I almost died. That was amazing.”

“Stay,” John whispered, tightening his arms, but it was stupid, he knew Rodney had to get off him sometime. 

Rodney laughed softly, the sweet little _h’m_ he sometimes let out when he was genuinely struck by something. He nuzzled at John’s jaw by his ear, kissed him sloppily. “I gotta move before I lose the condom,” he said. “That’d be a tough one to explain at the ER here.”

“Jesus,” John said, letting go of him, “way to kill the afterglow.”

Rodney kissed his cheekbone by way of apology, and carefully pulled out. He went over to the wastebasket to chuck the condom, and John watched his ass as he went. It wasn’t a wistful look, it went right past that into desperate. Rodney came back and sat on the edge of the bed, hunting absently for his boxers. 

“C’mere,” John said, soft and hoarse. 

“It’s like 11am, Sheppard,” Rodney laughed. “I don’t think I could sleep if you wanted me to.”

“I could,” John said. “I need it.”

“You haven’t been sleeping, like, at all,” Rodney said, frowning at him. 

“Yeah,” John said. “Gimme some big spoon. Just a couple minutes, then you can go play on the Internet like I know you want to.”

Rodney’s laptop was on the desk, he’d brought it over to show John something. John had shoved his orders hastily into the desk drawer when Rodney had knocked. He had to tell Rodney, it would be shitty to just disappear, but he didn’t have the words just now. 

Rodney sighed. “Fine, you big baby,” he said, and slid under the covers, wrapping himself around John. John sighed, as happy-sounding as he could make it, and nestled in. It was super gay but it didn’t matter. John’s odds of sex or even companionship at all for the next eight to twelve months, gay or straight, at least were pretty much zero, so he’d take what he could get. 

Despite the churning misery in his gut, he actually drifted off in a few minutes, Rodney’s hand tracing hypnotic patterns up and down his side. He dimly noticed when Rodney got out of the bed, but not enough to wake up; instead he curled deeper around himself and hid his face under the comforter. 

“What the fuck?” The voice was shrill, angry, and ripped him right out of his doze, rolling over and flailing for his sidearm in alarm. 

“Bzuh,” he said, then awareness slammed back into him— hotel room, Colorado, Rodney, orders. 

Rodney was standing over him, wearing only boxers, brandishing— John’s orders. He’d snooped through the drawer, though God only knew why. “What the fuck is this?”

“Oh,” John said, all the fight going out of him. “My new orders.”

“There are fucking plane tickets here,” Rodney said. “For tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” John said, looking down. “Guess they wanted to make sure I— I get time to re-train on Earth tech before the unit ships out.” He’d been about to say something more bitter ( _make sure I don’t escape_ ) but he had to get out of the habit of speaking his mind. 

“To _Afghanistan_ ,” Rodney said. 

“Yeah, Rodney, we’re at war, remember?” John rubbed his face, started hunting through the blankets for his underwear. Time to have a massive fight and have Rodney storm off so he could make a clean break, get on that plane tomorrow and show up to training at his new base with, yeah, a hickey on the base of his neck and fingernail scratches on his back but everybody’d assume it was a chick, and he’d let them. 

He pulled his boxers on and sat wearily on the edge of the bed. “I thought you were just being dramatic,” Rodney said finally, all the righteous indignation banked down to a simmer. He was standing beside the desk, looking forlorn, reading over the packet of orders with about as hollowed-out an expression as John had probably worn for that same activity, earlier that morning. 

“No,” John said finally, lamely, inadequately. “I really have been in the Air Force for about twelve years by now, I pretty much know how they operate.”

“I looked it up,” Rodney went on. “When you said you’d be dead within six months, I figured that also was drama, but, you’re kind of not far off.”

“No,” John said. “I know you think I’m a drama queen but actually, mostly, I’m not.”

“But it’s so ridiculous,” Rodney said. “You have the gene! We need you!”

“I talked to Landry,” John said, still addressing the floor. “He said the thing is, the gene therapy means it’s not such a big deal anymore. He told me it was 50/50 whether they were gonna try to keep me for the SGC’s purposes or send me back to my old unit. Guess my old unit won out.” At least Landry had looked regretful about it, and had explained it was beyond his control. Landry was kind of a jerk, not nearly as cool as Hammond had been, but he wasn’t a _complete_ asshole.

“We can’t let this happen,” Rodney said. “We need you. Atlantis needs you.”

John shrugged. Rodney’s face colored. “Sheppard! Are you just going to accept this?”

“What the fuck else can I do?” John grated out. “I’m a goddamned major in the goddamned Air Force, Rodney. This is my job, this is what I do, and no, I have never had any say where they send me. You can indicate preferences, you can try out for different training programs, but once that’s done, you do what they fucking tell you.”

“But that’s stupid,” Rodney said, shrill. “That’s completely asinine.”

“It is what it is,” John said. Fuck, this was why he hadn’t wanted to say anything. “Rodney! Christ. Let it go. There’s nothing you can do.” 

Rodney stopped, losing momentum, and visibly deflated. “Do you,” he said, quieter, faltering, “you _want_ to go?”

“What I want doesn’t matter,” John said dully. 

“Doesn’t it?” Rodney asked, and John thought, _fuck_ , and flashed back to every conversation like this with Nancy, and felt what little equanimity he had crumbling like a burnt-through timber.

“No,” John said, “it really doesn’t,” and stood up. “Rodney, you should go.” _Because otherwise I’ll start fucking crying like a little fucking spoiled princess baby,_ he thought but didn’t say. _Please_ , he went on, while he was not saying things, _please don’t Nancy me_. But he stood, silently, and didn’t look at Rodney.

“Were you going to tell me?” Rodney asked.

“Yes!” John said. “Jesus. Yes. I had figured I’d stop by this afternoon. I guess that’s, I don’t have to, now.”

“Let’s go talk to Elizabeth,” Rodney said. “She’s got strings she can pull.”

“Rodney,” John said, putting a hand over his eyes. “I— no. I can’t go crying to Elizabeth. This isn’t— look, it’s really not something civilians should get involved in.” He’d been burned by that before, people sticking their noses in, meaning well, but screwing everything up. 

“Not something civilians should get involved in,” Rodney said stiffly. 

John sat back down and rubbed his face with both hands. “No,” he said, “it never helps.” He looked up. “So long, Rodney.”

“God,” Rodney said, stung, “you’re an asshole!”

John looked down, biting his lips. “I guess,” he said, tight and flat. 

After a moment, Rodney walked out and let the door swing shut behind him. John winced as it shut, then got up and dragged himself into the shower. 

 

 

 

 

 

The CO was the same guy who’d tried to court martial him. John mustered all the patience he’d learned in a dozen offworld missions, showing no weakness, showing no defiance, showing no reaction, and stared blank-faced and neutral straight through the guy, offering him nothing to latch onto. 

“This is an unpleasant surprise, Major Sheppard,” Colonel Anson said, folding his hands across his desk and staring at John, who was sitting as close to attention as possible in the chair across from him. John didn’t respond. “Is your hair meant to be some kind of statement?”

Fuck. John twitched, but managed to suppress the nervous gesture of raising his hand. He hadn’t had a regulation haircut since before Antarctica. Nobody there gave a fuck, so he’d let it grow out a little bit to the point where the spikes kind of looked intentional. Since that first trip through the wormhole he’d been relying on occasional visits with a steady-handed Marine and a pair of clippers, with halfhearted scissor attempts, about half of which were executed by Rodney, to keep the top in line.

“Sorry, sir, I just returned from a deployment on Friday, I haven’t had a chance to get it seen to. I will as soon as I can,” John said. 

“Friday,” Anson said, frowning. “They’re not giving you a lot of down time.”

“No, sir,” John said. Nobody had mentioned that before, and it was unusually sympathetic of Anson to even notice, let alone comment on it. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad?

“Where was this deployment?” Anson asked. 

Fuck. This was a setup if ever there’d been one. “It’s, it’s classified, sir,” John said, wincing. 

“Weren’t you at McMurdo?” Anson asked. 

“For, um, for a while, yes,” John said. 

“That’s not classified,” Anson said, frowning deeper. 

“There’s also a barber _there_ , sir,” John said, and knew immediately he hadn’t made his tone apologetic enough. 

“How far are you going to push this?” Anson asked softly. 

“I meant no offense, sir,” John said belatedly. It felt like an offworld mission where suddenly the friendly priest sort had produced the shackles and the human sacrifices were about to start. Shit, fuck, goddamn, fuck. The difference here was that he had nobody backing him up. No team. No McKay to brain their way out, no Teyla to talk their way out, no Ford to look innocent and blow their way out. _Fuck_. 

“So you’ve been on some high-falutin’ above-top-secret-clearance mission and now your head’s even bigger under that unruly mop,” Anson said. “I must really have pissed somebody off to get stuck with you again.” He folded his hands into a different configuration. “Or is that _you_ pissed somebody off?”

Among his many faults, Anson didn’t include stupidity. “Not my place to ask, sir,” John said blandly. 

“I heard a rumor about you, Johnny-boy,” Anson said. “Classified or no, I still heard a rumor. And that rumor was that perhaps you’d got yourself into the business of fragging.”

John’s mouth opened in pure shock. Whoever’d let that slip ought to be court-martialed; the entire thing was so far beyond top secret it wasn’t even on the same planet. Literally. But he realized he had no way to defend himself without breaking clearance either. He closed his mouth, defeated. “I can’t discuss it,” he said. “Any of it. Sir, the entire thing is off-limits.”

“You’re not even going to deny it?” Anson raised an eyebrow. “Gutsy move, son.”

“I can’t, sir, the entire situation is classified. The people involved, the place, the circumstances— everything.” John looked down. “I can only assure you that there was nothing like fragging. Anyone who thinks there’d’ve been time or reason for such a thing obviously doesn’t know what was going on on that mission.”

“Oh, that’s convincing,” Anson said. “Well, for your next fuck-up, don’t expect you’ll get a nice cushy Antarctic post out of it.”

“There won’t be a next,” John said, but stopped short of dropping an f-bomb out loud to his CO. 

“Don’t count on that,” Anson said. “But you’ve used up all your lifelines, all your second chances. Next time, you’re out on your ass, and if I have any say, you’ll be in prison.”

“Understood, sir,” John said, reflecting that Anson was damn well going to make sure there was a next time, and it wouldn’t be that hard. Anson had always been big on showing people who was boss by moving goalposts around and so on. Surviving this upcoming year had gone from difficult to improbable. 

It made him really miss the Wraith. 

John turned his eyes downward to his folded hands, not bowing his head but projecting submission. A year ago he’d never have been able to do that, but since then, well, he’d seen some shit, and he knew sometimes you just had to feign defeat, submission, so they’d let you go, so they wouldn’t kill your scientist, so your young hot-headed teammate wouldn’t get himself killed in a pissing match. Thinking of Ford hurt badly enough that he closed his eyes for a second. What was another broken promise? What was another loose end? Another lost comrade, another breach of faith. Somebody was still pretty mad at him. There should’ve been, if not a formal change of command ceremony, at least a debriefing meeting, where he could’ve at least met his replacement. 

None of it bore thinking about. He opened his eyes to see Anson looking past him, frowning in annoyance. “Excuse me, sir,” said the breathless sergeant at the door as John turned his head to see. “But there’s a— a general here, and he’s looking for Major Sheppard.”

“General Dario?” Anson asked. 

“No, sir,” the sergeant said. “It’s no one I’ve met before. I didn’t catch his name. He’s sort of cranky and seems to be in a hurry, sir.” 

“I’ll just show myself in,” came a familiar sharp, drawling voice, and John blinked up numbly as General O’Neill shoved his way past the sergeant. “Major Sheppard, it seems there was a bit of a mix-up with your orders.”

John scrambled to feet he couldn’t feel, and managed a salute. O’Neill returned it, then returned Anson’s salute in turn. “I’m Brigadier General Jack O’Neill,” he said, “and Major Sheppard isn’t supposed to be here at all. Some stupid son of a monkey jumped the gun. You’re not being reassigned, Sheppard, you’re going back.”

John opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and O’Neill gave him a squint-eyed look. “Unless you don’t want to go,” he said. “If you’d rather be here— it’s an all-volunteer mission, so they won’t take you if you don’t wanna go. I was just under the impression—“

“God yes,” John said, “I don’t care who the new commander is, I can’t leave those people.”

“Oh,” O’Neill said blandly, “I actually think they’re just gonna leave you in charge. You did a pretty damn good job, son. The President actually talked to Dr. Weir about it.”

John blinked, dumbstruck, and caught a glimpse of Anson’s astonished, furious face from the corner of his eye. He didn’t have time to consider that. “I knew Dr. Weir wanted me back,” John said, “but I didn’t figure she had enough clout.”

“Oh,” O’Neill said, “she wasn’t the only one. But yes, for the record, she does.” He looked over at Anson, taking in the room, taking in the man’s expression, taking in the situation. He was pretty sharp, and he’d never let on but he’d probably read up on the whole backstory. Oh, he knew what he’d walked into. “Well, I hate to cut short your reunion, Colonel, but I need to take the Major back with me immediately. Nice little place you have here. Good luck on your upcoming deployment.” 

Anson’s face went blank and he murmured something noncommittal. O’Neill put his hand familiarly on John’s shoulder and steered him out of the room, which would’ve been annoying in any other circumstance but at the moment was goddamned _perfect_. “The President was annoyed that you weren’t available to speak to during his teleconference,” O’Neill said. “He had wanted to speak to you about what you did. He was very impressed, I’ll have you know, but he said it’d be a hard sell to get you proper recognition since the whole thing was so incredibly highly classified.”

“If I’d been in this for recognition I wouldn’t’ve gone on a super-ultra-top-secret mission, sir,” John said with a laugh. As they turned into the hallway he caught one last glimpse of Anson’s coldly furious face, and thought to himself, _I can never come back to Earth._ Not and be a member of the Air Force. He’d pissed off a couple of powerful people, and they were not going to be graceful about being outmaneuvered.

“He sure looked like somebody pissed in his Wheaties,” O’Neill said, jerking his head back toward Anson’s office. 

“You did, sir,” John said. 

O’Neill glanced over at John as he led him out of the building and across the pavement. “Good,” he said finally, as he put on his sunglasses. 

 

 

John could hear Rodney’s voice from all the way down the corridor. He was supposed to be interviewing people, but it just sounded like he was berating somebody. “—to think they’re deliberately sabotaging this mission,” he was finishing as John rounded the last corner. Someone ran square into him as the door slammed, and John caught her— for a woman it was— and set her back onto her feet. She was crying. Undoubtedly she was the target of Rodney’s ire. 

“Hey,” John said, steadying the woman, “hey, he’s all bark and no bite, really.”

The woman looked up at him, disbelieving. “He’s a monster,” she said. 

“Well,” John said contemplatively, “if you’re scared of _him_ , then you probably don’t want to see what _he’s_ scared of.”

She looked uncertain, and he patted her on the shoulder and let her go. “You’ve got him in a fine mood for me,” he said, and moved on down the hall. “This’ll be fun.” 

He opened the door and stepped through. It was a smallish lab space, with a big whiteboard across which all kinds of things were scrawled in various colors of whiteboard marker. Most of it looked like Rodney’s handwriting. Rodney himself was standing with his back to the door, hands on hips, contemplating the enormous whiteboard. “Well,” Rodney said, “you can’t be worse than the last one who was in here, though I didn’t call for the next one to be sent in. Either you’re very enterprising or you’re a smartass, and I probably won’t know which until it’s too late.” 

John stood in silence, suddenly thinking that he didn’t really know what to say. Rodney busily erased most of the whiteboard, then wrote across it “INTERVIEWING FOR THE POSITION OF PERSON WHO WILL KILL US ALL WITH YOUR INCOMPETENCE” in large blue block caps. 

“So you’re here to waste my time, too,” Rodney said, putting the cap back on the marker and turning around.

“Yeah,” John said. He jerked his chin at the whiteboard. “See you’re approaching this with the requisite optimism.”

“What are you doing here?” Rodney asked, perfectly blank.

“Apparently whoever gave me those new orders hadn’t taken Weir into account,” John said. “They sent O’Neill to countermand them and get me back.” 

Rodney’s shoulders loosened slightly. “So they’re at least keeping you in the Stargate program,” he said. “Here, or at Area 51?”

“Atlantis,” John said. “They’re letting me come back.”

“I _told_ you!” Rodney shouted, and threw the whiteboard eraser at him. “I fucking _told_ you Weir would do it!”

John ducked easily— Rodney was powerful but not particularly accurate when he threw things, as they’d learned to their chagrin on several occasions when it had mattered— and said, “Yes, you told me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I couldn’t ask her to!”

“Why the fuck _not_?” Rodney asked, punctuating the question by throwing three markers at him as he shouted, one after the other, each more wildly off-target than the last— John didn’t even bother ducking. 

“It doesn’t work that way,” John said. 

“Why not?” Rodney demanded, truly distraught, and John thought about that for a moment. Yeah OK, he’d been pretty distraught too. 

“Listen to me,” he said, quieter. “If I asked her for this, and she couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, then it would be that much worse for me when I went there anyway, because you bet your ass they’d know I’d asked. As it is that colonel is out for my blood. How much worse would it be if I tried to involve civilians in a military problem, and failed? You don’t understand how territorial the Air Force can be.”

“Why would you ever think Elizabeth wouldn’t do it?” Rodney asked, almost bewildered now. 

John shook his head. “Whether she didn’t have the political capital in the first place,” he said, “or needed to save it for something else, something more crucial—“

“What could be more crucial than getting us military staff who won’t get us all killed?” Rodney demanded, red-faced. 

It was suddenly too much for John, and he shouted back, “I don’t _know_ , okay?” 

“Then what is _wrong_ with you?” Rodney demanded. “Why can’t you just believe that somebody will stick up for you?”

“Because _nobody ever has_ ,” John yelled back. 

Rodney stared at him, dumbstruck, for a moment, and he stared back, breathing hard, and realized he’d said way too much. He hadn’t known that was gonna come out. Fuck. He took a deep breath, collected himself, and tried to think of something to follow that up with. 

Rodney’s expression changed slightly. “I suppose not,” he said.

John drew himself up a little stiffly. “Anyway,” he said, “I just thought you should know, I’m not being reassigned. O’Neill wouldn’t tell me who the new base commander will be, though. He was being weird and cagey about it.”

Rodney nodded tightly. “Rumor says Caldwell,” he said. 

John nodded. “He’s a tightass but he doesn’t seem like a bad guy.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, something he rarely let himself do in uniform, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I should go, check in with the others, see what assignment they’re figurin’ on givin’ me.”

Rodney came over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Come here, you idiot,” he said, and John let him hug him, even pulled his hands out of his pockets and slid them around Rodney’s waist eventually. 

“Caldwell’s tight-assed enough he’ll probably give a damn about this,” John murmured reluctantly into Rodney’s shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Rodney said. “We’ll have to be even more careful. Speaking of which, we should probably break this off, there might be a security camera and we’re going past cute into weird.”

John let go of him and stood back. “Right,” he said, and brushed his hands on his pants. “Right.” He straightened his shirt. He nodded at Rodney. “Anyway. Good luck on your interviews.”

“I’m a lot less afraid of dying, knowing you’re going to be there,” Rodney said, slanting half his mouth up. 

“I’m touched,” John said. 

“Well, Atlantis likes you,” Rodney said. 

John laughed. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it, isn’t it.”


	2. Silver Oak Leaf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John finds out who the new commander of the Atlantis base will be.
> 
> Rodney buys him a pizza. Smut ensues.

John left Rodney there, feeling a little numb inside, and wandered around until he saw some purposeful-looking uniformed people. He stopped one, an Air Force major, and asked him if he knew anything about where the personnel being selected for Atlantis were. The man smiled, and said, “Come with me.”

His name was Evan Lorne, he’d been with the SGC for years, and he’d just had the gene therapy and was just coming from a test that had proven that it had worked, unusually well actually. “I’m going out there on the _Daedalus_ ,” he said. “I can’t wait.” 

“It’s pretty fuckin’ cool there,” John said. 

“Oh,” Lorne said, stopping short with a frown. “You’ve been there?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Major John Sheppard. I was, ah—“

“Oh!” Lorne said, gratifyingly impressed. “Sheppard! I didn’t see your name tape.” He held out his hand. “It’s an honor to meet you! I’ve read every mission report.” 

Sheppard shook his hand. “Then you know how fucked-up it is out there,” he said. 

“Somebody said you’d been reassigned,” Lorne said, a little puzzled. “But then I heard a rumor you were coming back after all.”

“I wanted to come back,” Sheppard said. “They were trying to reassign me but that apparently didn’t go over well. I’m glad.”

“So it’s pretty fucked-up,” Lorne said, “but you’re still on board.”

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” Sheppard said. “Even if we do get a tight-assed base commander, it’s still amazing. I don’t usually get poetic in those mission reports but you know, you think there are some pretty places on Earth— and I’ve been to every continent— but there’s, out there, there’s shit you see, it’s… it’s like nothing you could ever find here.”

“I bet,” Lorne said. He gestured, and they kept walking, following some internal sense of direction of Lorne’s. “I’ve been through the Stargate here a few times, seen some amazing things, but I haven’t done a lot of flying of spaceships.”

“You a pilot?” John asked, clued in by the inflection that Lorne was implying he flew _things_ , just not _spaceships_. Lorne nodded. “What do you fly?”

“A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” Lorne said. “Most recently I’ve flown helicopters. Little ones, the ones they’ve been sending through the Stargates in pieces to keep on a few of our allied worlds. Before that, though, I did a lot with larger planes. C-130s, resupply stuff. I’m probably going to wind up doing a lot of paperwork and supply shit, requisitions and things, on this mission, but they promised me I could have a ‘gate team and get offworld time, which is what I really like.” 

John cringed, and rubbed the back of his neck. “The paperwork’s a mess,” he confessed. “It’s a fuckin’ shambles. I had no experience at any kind of large-scale command before this, and while I’m sure Sumner was a great officer and made good staffing decisions given what he expected, he brought almost no NCOs, and like, no paperwork people, almost no logistics people, no supply chain people. The quartermaster’s a pretty smart chick but even she was pretty stumped with some of the shit we had to deal with. So we just… we took a shitload of notes, and tried our best, but it’s a disgrace. If I had any say in the staffing I was gonna ask for, like, a whole staff of really competent NCOs.”

Lorne grinned. “Stargate operations tend to defy traditional paperwork,” he said. 

“Christ,” John said, “just you try explaining on a requisitions form that you’ve got a hundred yandas of fabric— a yanda being about an average woman’s armspan, fingertip to fingertip— suitable for making replacement towels, sheets, and jackets, and it cost you about a pound of homemade aspirin and a few hours of your civil engineers’ time, plus your commanding officer had to let the Crone of Tarabithia or whatever beat his ass with a wooden cane for about twenty minutes in what was either a sexual or religious ritual, he really wasn’t sure, he was kind of drunk at the time— on purpose— and also they threw in fifteen crates of fruit, the ‘gate addresses of their six best trading partners, and gave him back some of the aspirin so he could sit down on the ride home…” He shook his head, and Lorne was helpless with laughter, stopping to sag against the wall. “I don’t know, they didn’t cover this in paratrooper school or diving school or flight school, and I sure as hell didn’t encounter it on any of my tours in Afghanistan! I don’t know what goes on the damn form! How do you put a dollar sign on an ass-beating?”

Lorne wheezed for a moment, and managed to get his voice under control enough to ask, “Did you really get your ass beat for towels?”

“Yes,” John said. “I’m not proud, but you know what, we _really_ needed towels, and it beat interrogation with a car battery any day.”

“Oh God,” Lorne said, standing up on wobbly legs. He snorted again, and got himself under control enough to say, “I’m really scared to know what you had to do for copper.”

“Oh,” John said, “they just wanted our engineers to help them improve the safety features of the mine.” He shot Lorne a sly look, waited until he wasn’t expecting it, and said “Plus I had to blow all seven mine foremen.”

Lorne spluttered, squawked with laughter, and said, “Really?”

“Pff,” John said, “no.” He punched Lorne lightly in the arm. “I would never put that on a requisition form anyway. We got regs.”

Lorne sobered quickly, and shot him a sideways look. “Yeah?”

John rolled his eyes. “No,” he said. “I gotta say, I don’t envy whoever’s taking over as base commander. Because I made it pretty clear when I first started that I don’t give a damn about that shit. You tell me shit I need to know, like significant relationships and acrimonious breakups, so I don’t do stupid shit like assign you a remote posting with your bitter recent ex.” He gave Lorne a sidelong look. “We kinda got used to doing things that way, and a pretty decent percentage of that original crew had reason to appreciate it. I hope the new guy isn’t a tightass or we’re gonna have some culture shock.”

Lorne nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he said, “the SGC in general attracts a lot of… unconventional types.” He looked cautiously at John. “I grew up with two moms so I’m kind of… I don’t like it when people take issue with that stuff, but I’ve learned to mostly keep my mouth shut.”

John nodded glumly. “People have always kinda assumed I was gay,” he said. “I kind of let them, because I don’t care, but it really makes my life miserable when I get a C.O. who wants to give a shit.” That had always been true and was kind of a lie now. He felt kind of reckless; he’d gotten a death sentence commuted today. “Plus space-sickness is totally a real thing. You do all kinds of stuff you never thought you would. But, for the record, I have never blown seven mine foremen in a row.” 

“That would be really impressive jaw control,” Lorne said blandly. “But six, now, that I could believe.”

John snorted. “Not even one, as it happens.” He sobered a little. “Thing is, it’s different out there. You never quite know what you’re gonna get but most of the ones in regular contact with the gate network have kind of… similarly different sexual mores. And for them, if you’re a powerful woman, it’s kind of expected that you can have any guy that strikes your fancy. It’s… really different than Earth.”

Lorne nodded thoughtfully. “It’s different through the Milky Way ‘gates too— I haven’t done a lot of first contact stuff but I’ve had a little direct experience with the various cultures and a lot of them kind of… the shit we do on Earth doesn’t fly, out there.”

“Yeah,” John said. “If you’re on a ‘gate team you gotta understand, there’s some predatory women and they’ll do shit to you that you don’t expect. I mean, men too, but I feel like Earth women are kind of more used to dealing with that and usually know how to handle themselves. I’ve had some trouble with guys who just don’t understand the dynamic.”

“Hm,” Lorne said. 

“And it’s different now, but for a really long time we didn’t know if we’d ever have contact with Earth again,” John said. “I did some shit I’m not particularly proud of, but at the time, it was a choice between me doing something I wasn’t thrilled about, and everybody on the base going without something we all needed. And there were a couple of times we were pretty hungry. We were living on the Pegasus equivalent of eggs and ramen, and not much of that, for like, a month once.”

Lorne regarded him solemnly, leaning against a door he was obviously about to open. “Yeah,” he said, “I’d probably do some pretty crazy shit if it came down to that.”

“Well,” John said, “sometimes, that’s what it’s about.”

“Like flying a spaceship with a nuke on a kamikaze run,” Lorne said. 

“Well,” John said. “That’s different. That’s me knowing that McKay can pretty much do anything in ten minutes, and if I could give him ten minutes, he could probably save two galaxies. I figured, that was worth getting instantly liquefied, even if I wouldn’t be around to see it.”

Lorne was still leaning on the door. “Really,” he said. “McKay specifically.”

“Yeah,” John said. “You’ll see. He’s a genius. You just learn not to ever take anything he says personally. Me, I mostly think he’s funny.” He shrugged. “You get used to him.”

Lorne nodded thoughtfully and opened the door. There were a handful of Marines in the room, and a couple of Air Force officers and noncoms, including two First Lieutenants so painfully young John cringed inwardly. As young as or younger than Ford. _God, Ford._ Lorne introduced John around, and everyone was either politely blank or gratifyingly impressed. Wasn’t hard to see who’d had the security clearance long enough to read up, and who was probably going to need more debriefing before John would really accept that they were volunteers. 

“Did you know the _Daedalus_ was on its way when you took that ship on that run with the nuke?” one of the lieutenants, a breathless young white man named Evans, asked. 

John half-smiled. “I knew it was coming,” he said. “But I figured it was still a day out, at least.”

“So you were really prepared to die,” Evans said, a little starry-eyed. 

“Man,” John said, “people are makin’ that into a deathwish thing. I didn’t fuckin’ _want_ to die, I just figured I was bound to either way, so I might as well take out a couple thousand of ‘em with me.” He was kind of uncomfortable with the attention, especially the looks the heretofore politely-blank ones were giving him as they caught up. 

“Yeah, but that still takes balls of goddamn steel,” Lorne said. 

“Or it makes me a big chicken,” John argued. “Wanting to go out with a bang instead of die with a whimper. We knew they wouldn’t leave anyone on the base alive, and once they took it, they’d use it to get to Earth and kill everyone. Would you really wanna die in the last-ditch defense?”

The starry-eyed young lieutenant hesitated, thoughtful, and before anyone else could speak, the door opened. “Ah,” said General O’Neill, “there you are, Sheppard.”

“Oh,” John said, straightening up— the guy was kind of informal but he was a general after all— “I didn’t know anyone was lookin’ for me.”

“I wasn’t,” O’Neill said, “until I was.” He looked around. “Getting to know your new colleagues, I see.”

“Yes, sir,” John said. He had a sudden thought. “Do we know yet who the new base commander will be?” He tried not to sound too hopeful. “It isn’t you, is it, sir?”

“Me?” O’Neill looked alarmed. “Oh, no, no no,” he said. “No. They’d said it’ll go to a colonel, maybe a lieutenant colonel.” He looked oddly pleased, though. Was he being coy about something? He totally knew who it was, John could read that pretty easily.

“Carter?” John asked, hopeful. She had some brains. He’d been really impressed with everything he’d heard about her. Except maybe Rodney’s infatuation with her breasts. But then, he flattered himself Rodney had really good taste in people he fancied.

O’Neill looked thoughtful. “No,” he said. “You’re really gunning for SG-1, huh?”

“Well,” John said. “They’re kind of famous.” And they knew better than to assume shit on the other side of a Stargate should be handled just like shit on Earth.

“Yeah,” Lorne said, “but they’re kind of disaster magnets, too.” O’Neill laughed. 

“Naw,” O’Neill said, “they actually have already picked their guy out. And the choice is that they’re going to stay with someone who’s been there from the beginning.”

John blinked. “We don’t have any colonels left from the beginning,” he said, mystified. He looked around, and Lorne looked down suddenly with a smile, like _he_ knew something too, or could guess. John hated being the last one to know but he really couldn’t imagine what O’Neill could mean.

“Well,” O’Neill said, “they figured they could fix that.” He reached over and clouted John in the arm. “Congrats, Sheppard, they’re making you a Lt. Colonel.”

John stood numbly, blinking at O’Neill. His mouth opened of its own volition, but no words came out, so he closed it again. He blinked a couple times, took a breath, and said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Well,” O’Neill said, as pleased as John had ever seen him look, “it seems to me you’ve got some pretty powerful detractors, but you also have some pretty powerful supporters. And the detractors tried their level best, with this morning’s fuckup, but it turns out they’re outgunned. Doesn’t hurt that you did a damn fine job this whole last year. And the President was sorry he couldn’t swing a Medal of Honor for ya, so he figured he’d give you a promotion instead. Kinda the least he could do.”

“Holy fuck,” John said weakly, stunned. A promotion. He should’ve been in the zone for Lt. Col. later this year but he knew the Afghanistan shit had knocked him down more than a peg; he’d pretty well figured it had ensured he’d languish unpromoted until they booted him for rank stagnation. This was below the zone. He’d never had a below the zone promotion in his entire career, not even when he was hot shit.

“So congratulations,” O’Neill said. “Get your dress blues dry-cleaned, they’re gonna do a couple people’s promotions tomorrow night, and then there’s a fancy dinner thing I don’t have to go to but you do with some IOA people.”

“Dress blues,” John said, blinking. Of course he owned a set. But it hadn’t come with him to Atlantis. It was with the few other things he owned that hadn’t come to Atlantis. Oh right, in a storage locker at Peterson. “Fuck.” 

“You look a little shell-shocked,” O’Neill said. 

“This is about as far from how I expected today to go as it’s possible to get,” John said. 

“You’d think you’d be used to that,” O’Neill said, grinning.

 

 

The knock at Rodney’s hotel door wasn’t entirely unexpected. He went over, set the chain anyway, and peered suspiciously out. It was Sheppard, looking absolutely bizarre in a gray t-shirt and khaki cargo pants. Of course the guy didn’t wear BDUs every day off-duty, it was just that in a year of knowing him Rodney had never actually seen him in civilian clothing. He had no idea what the guy’s fashion sense was like. 

From the current presentation, not much. Not that Rodney could talk. Sheppard also looked bizarrely agitated, so Rodney let him in and said “I was just about to order a pizza.”

“I found out who the new base commander is,” Sheppard said, intense and a little looming. Rodney stepped back. Oh, it must be bad news. 

“Oh?” he asked, concerned. “Who is it? Not Caldwell?”

“ _Me_ ,” Sheppard said, and he was wide-eyed and looked freaked-out. 

“Hey,” Rodney said, relieved. “Sweet. You’re keeping your job!”

“No,” Sheppard said, “it’s a new job. It’s— they _promoted_ me.”

“Okay,” Rodney said, confused. “But, it’s the same job you had before. Is that really a promotion?”

“The detachment is almost doubling in size,” Sheppard said. “And when I mean promoted me, I mean _promoted_ me.”

Rodney scrunched his face up, impatient; he was pretty sure he understood, but didn’t really get why Sheppard was freaking out about it. “So okay, it’s a promotion, and it’s more complicated and harder, but it’s still the job you had, just like mine’s still the job I had.”

“Yes but I mean promotion,” Sheppard said, and he’d advanced to the point that he had Rodney cornered against the wall. “I mean O-4 to O-5. I mean new rank insignia. I mean Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Oh,” Rodney said, brighter. “Oh, right.” Promotions meant different things in the military. For him it just meant a raise, maybe, if he was paying attention. “Hey, neat,” he said, just as he realized that Sheppard was trembling. “Oh, hey,” he said, concerned, and just then Sheppard mashed him against the wall, not going for his mouth but just pressing against him, pressing his face into the crook of Rodney’s neck, fingers around the edges of Rodney’s shoulders. Jeez, the guy was crap at hugging. 

“It’s below the zone,” Sheppard said quietly, unsteadily. “I woulda been in the zone in another six months to a year or so but they’d made it pretty clear that the Antarctica post was gonna bump me out of consideration for it, and then there’d be a real slim chance— like three percent— they’d consider me above the zone, but if they passed me over then, it’s mandatory separation.”

“Most of that was jargon,” Rodney pointed out, though he was enjoying the press of Sheppard’s body to his, now that he understood that the man wasn’t in distress, but was overwhelmingly excited. He could understand that. He ran his hands soothingly up and down Sheppard’s back, enjoying how soft the t-shirt was, how well he could feel the muscles of his back through it. 

“I’m a goddamned Lieutenant Colonel, Rodney,” Sheppard said, “a fuckin’ BTZ promotion, I don’t— I can’t—“ 

“Stop trying to talk,” Rodney said fondly, grabbing Sheppard’s jaw and kissing him. 

Sheppard pretty much attacked him, aggressive tongue and teeth, and didn’t stop talking anyway, manhandling him around the room without stopping to look where they were going. “You don’t understand,” he was saying, breathless and broken-off, “never figured I’d make it— career was over— fuck, Rodney— McMurdo was the end of the line—“ Here he paused, as he’d managed to shove Rodney over onto the bed and fall onto him in a move that Rodney had expected to knock the breath out of both of them, but it hadn’t, and now Sheppard was on top of him, all hot breath and wet mouth and heavy pressure, still shaking with excitement, wide-eyed like Rodney had never seen him. 

“C’mere,” Rodney said, and hauled him properly onto the bed, rolled over and sat on his hips, put his hands on Sheppard’s chest and held him flat. “Take a breath.”

Sheppard was breathing hard, and looked up at him, dazed and wondering. “It’s, yeah,” he said. 

“Small words,” Rodney said, “short sentences, plain English. I get that you’re excited to come back to Atlantis.”

Sheppard smiled at him, so beautiful Rodney could have broken something just looking at him, and visibly collected himself. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I am.”

“So what’s all this with acronyms and things?” Rodney asked. 

Sheppard shook his head, grinning broadly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. It means they can’t kick me out anytime soon. It means I can go back with you. It means—“ He shook his head. “It means let’s fuck, Rodney.”

“But,” Rodney said, still pretty fixated on the pizza idea, but hey, that was Sheppard’s body pressing against his, and Sheppard’s erection against his hip, and Sheppard’s hands came up and pulled his face down, and they rolled around and got frantically and clumsily undressed, and Sheppard was way too excited to do Rodney any reasonable justice but it was so goddamn cute to see him happy like this that Rodney didn’t even try to get him to focus properly. He let Sheppard rub off against him, jacked him a little to finish him off, then kissed him slowly until he had himself calmed down a bit. 

“Did you,” Sheppard said blurrily, curled around him sticky and naked and sleepy and still breathing hard. 

“Nah,” Rodney said. “I’m okay. I’m gonna get a pizza and feed half of it to you, and then we’re going to do this properly.”

“Mm,” Sheppard said. Rodney petted his hair, enjoying how soft it was and how normally touch-shy Sheppard would let him do anything he liked at times like this. Usually he himself was too fucked-out to enjoy it properly. At the moment he was a little on-edge, turned on, but not impatient, and it let him really appreciate how beautiful Sheppard was, his long lean lines and gold-and-cream skin and sort of feline grace. 

“You’ve really had a roller coaster ride today, haven’t you,” Rodney mused, getting his fingers down through the thickness of Sheppard’s hair, scritching at his scalp. From reassignment to reinstatement to promotion seemed pretty up-and-down to Rodney, anyway. Maybe pilots were better at absorbing those kinds of G-forces. Probably not, given the way Sheppard had broken and yelled at him this afternoon. _Nobody ever has_ still kind of echoed unpleasantly in Rodney’s ribcage.

“Mmmmm,” Sheppard grumbled blissfully. 

“It’s enough to give you whiplash. What do you like on your pizza?”

“Scheeze,” Sheppard slurred. 

“What, just cheese?” Rodney squinted at him, scritched a little more, feeling the muscles under his scalp loosening a little as he worked. It sort of wasn’t fair, how thick Sheppard’s hair was. 

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, eyes sinking closed.

“Can I put pepperoni on it too?”

“Nnn,” Sheppard said, eyebrows drawing briefly together but eyes remaining closed. 

Rodney sighed, ordered a pepperoni pizza, and looked up the nearest liquor store that could sell full-strength beer, not the 3.2% crap. Oh, easy walking distance. Perfect. He silently blessed the Internet for making the research so easy, dressed himself reasonably, pulled the blankets up over Sheppard, and went out. 

He came back with his 12-pack of reasonable beer, sat in the hotel lobby for a couple of minutes until the pizza guy showed up, then came upstairs to find that Sheppard was still completely passed-out in the bed. 

“Hey,” he said. “Wakey-wakey.”

Sheppard rolled over. It was a mixed bag, with him; sometimes he was the lightest of sleepers and came fully awake with creepy suddenness; sometimes waking him up was like rousing a bear from hibernation. This was an in-between kind of sleep, and he sat up endearingly rumpled, his hair an astonishing disaster. “Oh,” he said. “You got pizza _and_ beer.”

“Well,” Rodney said modestly, “I am widely held to be a genius.”

“You’re fuckin’ amazing,” Sheppard said, and got out of the bed. 

“Um,” Rodney said, “don’t you want to put some pants on? Or at least some underwear?

“Naked,” Sheppard said, “is probably the best way of eating pizza,” and set to work on Rodney’s pants. They rolled around in bed, managed not to get pizza sauce everywhere even though Sheppard insisted on picking all the bits of pepperoni off the slices he ate, and demolished the pie and four or five of the beers in a pleasant hour or so. Sheppard was still bright and intense and a little too wide-eyed, almost bubbly, which wasn’t at all typical of him. It was inexplicably hot, and Rodney kept having to stop whatever he was doing to touch him. It was like he could absorb some of the energy, the sheer happiness coming off the guy in waves. 

Sheppard rolled off the bed while Rodney was still shoving the crust of his last piece of pizza into his mouth, and slithered to the floor, setting his beer bottle down. “Oh,” Rodney said, as Sheppard grabbed his hips and hauled him to the edge of the bed, then yanked his underwear down and nosed down his belly. 

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, “your cock needs to get sucked.”

“I don’t think I’d’ve said it that way,” Rodney said, “but I’m not disagreeing with you.”

“And then I think I’m probably going to put my dick in your ass and fuck you long and slow for like an hour,” Sheppard said, his voice low and a little growly and going straight to Rodney’s spine via his balls. 

“Okay,” Rodney said, fairly whimpering with bliss as Sheppard swallowed his cock down. Sheppard had gotten really, really good at this. He’d been pretty good to start with, better than Rodney had expected from a guy who had insisted he wasn’t gay, but over the last almost-year he’d become a complete master of sucking Rodney into a state of perfect readiness, then fucking him senseless. It was down to an art. 

It was almost no time before Rodney was shivering and saying “Ah Sheppard, I’m so close, get inside me if you’re gonna,” and making uncontrollable little hip-jerking movements into his mouth. 

“Mm,” Sheppard said, looking up at him through his lashes, “nah, I want you to come.” He twisted his fingers inside Rodney, stroking insistently, and Rodney shuddered and twitched, crying out. 

“Oh God,” he said, “oh God, are you sure, holy— holy shit—“

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, “yeah, I wanna see it. I wanna taste it. C’mon, Rodney.” He swallowed him down, all the way down, sucking hard, and Rodney tipped his head back and let go with a shout. 

Sheppard pulled off him, hand moving perfectly, and Rodney looked down when he could breathe and saw that Sheppard had let it get messy, spunk dripping down his chin and streaked across his cheek. He was watching Rodney, grinning, eyes dark. 

“Oh my God,” Rodney panted, and let himself collapse onto his back. “Oh my God.”

Sheppard snagged his beer from the floor and climbed up to lie beside Rodney, swigging the last of it with an unmistakably smug expression as he licked his lips and wiped come off his face. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what I wanted.”

“I think I’m dead,” Rodney said, still panting.

Sheppard leaned over after a minute and blew a sticky, beery raspberry on his belly. Rodney squeaked and flailed, and they wound up in another wrestling match. Sheppard had the edge, usually, but more so while Rodney was still in his post-orgasmic stupor. He gave up quickly and let Sheppard pin him and kiss him for a while, tasting mostly of beer but just a little bit of sex. 

Sheppard was hard, but didn’t seem particularly urgent about it. “I guess it does kinda feel different,” he said, amused, his body taut and heavy, most of his weight settled between Rodney’s legs. “Being a Lieutenant Colonel.” He looked almost intolerably smug, and Rodney pulled him down and kissed him some more. 

“Well,” Rodney said, “I’m privileged to have been part of the experiment.”

“Oh,” Sheppard said, “it’s not over. I got another thing I wanna try.” He grinned down at Rodney, then kissed the tip of his nose playfully. “It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while, though. Not just because I’m important now.”

“An experiment?”

“Maybe,” Sheppard said. He kissed Rodney’s nose again, then sank down to kiss his mouth, more contemplatively than hungrily. “You done, or can I keep playing?”

“I had no plans for tonight,” Rodney said. “And if you keep being all naked and smug like that, I’ll be ready to go again in a minute.”

“Oh, the smug’s a turn-on, is it?” Sheppard asked, looking even more smug, if that were possible.

“Well,” Rodney said, feeling suddenly sappy, “it’s more that you’re happy and that’s a damn nice change.”

Sheppard blinked at him, serious a moment, then dipped his head and kissed him, long and slow and deep and sweet. It went on for a long time, until Rodney had to come up for air. “Oh,” he said, “wow.”

“I think I have to fuck you,” Sheppard said, his voice low and rough. 

“I would be on board with that,” Rodney answered a little unsteadily. 

“Can I tie you down?” Sheppard asked, squinting a little self-consciously. 

“Oh,” Rodney said, and he was suddenly all the way hard. “God. Yes.”

“I thought you might like that,” Sheppard said, smiling to himself as he pushed up and rolled off of Rodney. He grabbed the belt of the hotel robe Rodney had hung on the hook on the bathroom door, and came back, naked save for his dogtags, eyeing Rodney with a speculative grin. “Face up or facedown?”

Rodney’s mouth went dry. “Facedown,” he said. He’d never really thought about it before but he knew, right away, what he wanted. Sheppard made a little circular gesture indicating Rodney should turn around. 

“What do you think, you want a gag or a blindfold or anything like that, or should I just tie you to the headboard and get on with it?” Sheppard asked as Rodney climbed onto his hands and knees. 

“Just ties,” Rodney said. Talking was difficult, and became impossible as Sheppard wrapped the strip of terrycloth around his wrists and threaded it through the slats of the bed’s decorative headboard, propped him up with pillows and the bedspread, shoved his limbs into position. There was nothing efficient and military about the knots, Rodney noted absently, and tried to draw a conclusion, but Sheppard’s hands were on him, pushing him into the proper position, and he realized dimly that his brain was pretty much shutting down. He was nothing but skin and desire, and his entire world narrowed down to Sheppard’s hands moving over him.

He had no capacity for action or forethought, could only react. Utterly, blissfully free from thought or care or worry, he gave himself over to Sheppard’s handling, crying out without worrying who would hear, shivering and writhing without worrying how it looked. Sheppard stroked his body, rubbed stubble against his skin here and there, bit him a couple of times, sucked marks into his skin in a few places, reducing Rodney to incoherent and helpless arousal, all without touching his cock. He couldn’t move, he was immobilized by the ties and by Sheppard’s legs snug behind his, pinning him against the pillows. His cock was so hard now, trapped between his body and the pillow, but he wasn’t rubbing it, wasn’t pressing against it; he couldn’t move on his own, he was depending entirely on Sheppard for his pleasure.

“Please,” Rodney managed, his mouth thick and loose, beyond his controlling, “please,” and Sheppard laughed, thighs rubbing against Rodney’s thighs. 

“You wanna beg for it?” he murmured, bending against Rodney, mouth beside his ear, stubble abrading his shoulder, and Rodney shuddered, moaned. “Are you a slut, begging to get fucked?”

“Nngh,” Rodney panted, not even worrying if his voice was embarrassingly thin or shrill, “God, please, yes, fuck me.” He’d never been so turned-on in his life. He’d been tied to this headboard forever. He couldn’t take it any longer. He wanted desperately for it never to stop. “Please, oh God!”

Sheppard’s slick fingers finally, finally slid into him, and he opened right up, desperate. “You’re so ready for me,” Sheppard said, low and hoarse and sounding like sex incarnate. “You can’t wait to take my cock. You want it? You want all of it?”

“Yes, now,” Rodney begged, “please, give it to me.”

“God,” Sheppard said, “you filthy slut,” and his tone was frankly admiring as without further preamble he fitted his cock against Rodney and pushed the whole thing slowly in, steady and inexorable. “Oh God,” he said, voice still low and rough but a little tighter now, “look at you, look at you taking the whole thing, God you’re so hot, you nasty whore.”

“Fuck,” Rodney whined shakily; Sheppard’s cock was enormous, so perfect, sliding relentlessly into place, filling his entire body, pressing up into his guts, along his spine, driving the breath from his lungs, becoming his entire world. He was bound and pinned and held, nothing but an object for Sheppard to use, no purpose but to be a thing to fuck. Sheppard’s balls came to rest against his and he trembled, stretched wide, completely filled. “Ah, fuck, give, yes.” It was as articulate as he had the capacity to be.

“Oh, I’m gonna give it to you, all right,” Sheppard said, and started fucking him, deep and hard but slow, so slow, like he was being thorough, like he was fucking every possible part of Rodney at once, methodical and thorough and possessive. “Ahh, take it, let me, yeah, oh I’m gonna fuck you so hard.”

Rodney pulled back until his wrist ties were taut, and let Sheppard pin him against the pillows as he fucked in harder, a little faster. He was incredibly turned-on, like his skin had been electrified; everywhere Sheppard was touching him tingled, where his cock was shoving up against the pillows in time with Sheppard’s thrusts was making him crazy, and his entire body was filled with the slick hard press of Sheppard’s cock, slow and regular and so, so big, so thick, so hard.

“Fuck me,” Rodney begged unnecessarily, then “ah, fuck me harder,” and Sheppard laughed, low and breathless in his ear, and shoved into him harder, rocking him forward into the pillows. His cock dragged toe-curlingly over something inside Rodney, then sparked back over that same spot on the way back in, and Rodney shuddered and gasped.

Sheppard bit his shoulder and drove in, harder still, faster, and Rodney cried out and bucked, pulling against the ties, struggling against the pressure, helpless to move. Sheppard was fucking him hard and fast, pounding him up against the pillows bracing him. Over the noises he himself was making, desperate cries and panting gasps, Rodney could hear Sheppard’s voice, low but less and less even, telling him what a slut he was, praising how well he was taking it, promising to keep fucking him forever. 

“Yes,” Rodney chanted mindlessly, “yes, yes, fuck me, please, please don’t stop, don’t ever stop, oh God—“

“You fucking love it,” Sheppard said, “oh, you, fuck, you slut, you fucking love to take my cock, don’t you? You love it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Rodney panted, almost sobbing, “yes,” Sheppard was hitting him just right, driving him forward into the pillows, rubbing his dick against them as Sheppard’s cock rubbed against him inside, and all of his skin was sparking at once, “yes, oh God, oh fuck, fuck me!”

Sheppard’s body slammed into him, hips pistoning in, cock so deep inside him, and Rodney was shuddering uncontrollably, shaking wildly, crying out, pinioned and helpless— 

“Ah fuck,” Rodney yelled, “ah,” and he was coming, and coming, and _coming_ , and Sheppard fucked him through it, still fucking him hard and fast, too hard, it was too intense, Rodney shuddered and cried out and God, he was still fucking _coming_ , the most intense aftershocks he’d ever had, he was making the most ridiculous noises and Jesus, Sheppard was still _fucking_ him and _he was still coming_. 

Rodney’s body finally shuddered to a stop, trembling and jittering, pleasure still zinging through him, and Sheppard was still fucking him, hips stuttering into him, composure shredding away. Rodney lay limp, head bowed, motionless and open, Sheppard’s cock reaming mercilessly into him, Sheppard’s hands clenched bruisingly at his hips, using Rodney’s body as he pleased. 

By the time Sheppard came, Rodney was gone, floating distantly in a post-orgasmic haze, barely aware of the pounding and the shaking and the shouting, like it was happening to someone else, someone else’s hole being used for someone else’s pleasure. But he was dimly aware, as Sheppard shuddered and bucked and slammed into him, brokenly stammering his name, that he was totally, totally going to whack off to this, weeks from now in the shower or something, thinking about the way John had completely come apart above him, inside him, around him. 

He lay there completely motionless for a little while, Sheppard’s body slick with sweat against his, both of them heaving for breath. After a while Sheppard pulled out of him, and whether he’d gone soft or Rodney was just that loose, he slid right out. He was gone totally for a moment, but then his hands were back, gentle, running over Rodney’s body, wiping sweat away, apologizing with soft touches where the skin was bruised. John’s mouth joined in, kissing gently where there were bite-marks. Then Sheppard’s fingers were working at the knots, unpicking them carefully, freeing Rodney’s wrists. 

Sheppard turned him over, shoving the bedspread out of the way and retrieving a pillow, easing Rodney down into a loose curl on his side, pulling up a blanket. “Sorry,” John murmured in his ear, “I got pretty carried away. Hope you didn’t plan on doing a lot of walking tomorrow. Or sitting.”

Rodney moaned a little, not really even trying for words. “C’mere,” he mumbled finally, and Sheppard curled around him, kissing his shoulder. “Mm,” he sighed, and slid off into the warm oblivion that awaited him.

 

 

 

“You got him that promotion,” Rodney said without preamble the next morning. 

Elizabeth looked up over the edge of her laptop monitor. “Yes,” she said, breaking into a grin. “I did. I mean, first off, I insisted on it, because I wouldn’t have John replaced and the command’s too important to go to just a major. But also, the President said he agreed John deserved a Medal of Honor but was unlikely to get it, given that the entire expedition was so top-secret Congress wouldn’t be able to know anything about what he did. So I asked him what we could give John instead, and O’Neill said that a promotion would probably be a lot more meaningful to Sheppard, if he knew the guy at all, and I agreed. So promotion it was.”

Rodney huffed a quiet little laugh, mouth slanting in what might have been a half-smile. “He didn’t believe me,” he said. “When I found out he was being reassigned, I told him to go to you. I told him you could help him, could take care of him. And he didn’t believe me.” 

Elizabeth nodded thoughtfully. “I took the liberty of looking him up,” she said. “I don’t think… I don’t think he’s used to having anyone he can count on.”

“He said as much,” Rodney said.

Elizabeth looked him up and down, assessing. “He really tells you things.”

“He kind of does,” Rodney said, grimacing. “And kind of doesn’t.”

“Well,” Elizabeth said, “from what I understood, even if it is only my agitation that got him this promotion, it really is literally the least we could do. So if you don’t tell him, I won’t tell him. Let him think the powers that be noticed him on their own and decided to bestow this on him.”

“Please,” Rodney said, “he’s not an idiot.” Elizabeth simply kept her gaze on him. “Fine. I won’t say anything.”

“Good,” Elizabeth said, satisfied. “Won’t you sit down?” she asked, gesturing. Rodney hesitated strangely, a look she couldn’t read crossing his face, then took the chair and lowered himself down into it gingerly. She frowned. “Are you okay?”

He gave her a look she couldn’t parse, then another look when she didn’t react. “Jeez,” he said quietly, “I’m fine.”

“You don’t seem fine,” Elizabeth said, frowning harder. Rodney had a bad back, or at least he frequently complained about having one, but it rarely actually acted up. 

He rolled his eyes. “Somebody was really happy and excited last night,” he said. “I can’t imagine why. Somebody’s like the fucking Energizer Bunny when he’s happy and excited, and there’s kind of a price to pay for that.”

“Oh, my,” Elizabeth said, sort of admiringly, and blushed a little as she thought about what that meant. 

“Well,” Rodney said, “I’m not complaining, not really.” He smiled crookedly. “It was pretty great.”

“I didn’t do it to make him happy,” Elizabeth said, “or to help your sex life, but I’m not sorry that those were side effects.”

Rodney just grinned, at that, then pulled out his laptop and said, “Let’s get to work.”


	3. The Sex Fort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blanket forts and fucking.  
> And awkward realizations and foreboding.  
> This story has been pretty front-loaded with porn because there's gonna be a dry spell. Fair warning.  
> Chapter set during/after The Intruder. (But, like most of my stuff, does not recap episode events. It strikes me that's probably annoying if you're not super familiar with canon but sorry, I just don't ever think recaps come out well and anyway, I already *know* what happened onscreen, I'm more interested in the rest! :))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for unsafe sex and a hint of internalized misogyny. He's as surprised by it as you are.

“We’re going to redo all the personnel quarters, I think,” Elizabeth said. “Of course we’ll have need of that much more billeting, but it seems to me like we should give serious consideration to who goes where.” 

“Naturally,” John said, leaning back in his chair. The Daedalus was only two days out from Earth and they had over two weeks left of the journey. Elizabeth was already calling meetings. John was already bored, antsy, and constantly freezing since they kept the ship’s ambient temperature in the living areas at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. 

“I have two conflicting thoughts on it,” Elizabeth said. “One is that we should cluster command staff near one another, making it easier for them to collaborate in case of emergency. But the other is that we should distribute command staff, making it less likely that anything impacting the city’s operation would affect all of them at once. Thoughts?”

“Aw,” John said suddenly, sitting forward, “am I gonna have to break in a new suitemate?”

“Suitemate,” Lorne said, a little alarmed.  "What is this, college?"

“Ma— er, Colonel Sheppard and Dr. McKay have quarters that share a bathroom,” Weir said. 

“Picked ‘em out for the balconies,” Sheppard said. “Gorgeous view of sunrise.” 

“You could keep your room,” Weir said, frowning at her computer. She had a map on it, of course. 

“There were some quite nice places in the newly-explored areas,” Beckett said mildly. 

“All I really want’s a balcony,” John said a little wistfully. Rodney was carefully not looking at him. He scratched the back of his head. “A balcony that faces east. That’s about all I care about.”

“I’d like a little more space,” Rodney said. “Maybe a couch, y’know?”

“Nobody’s answered my thought, though,” Elizabeth said. “Should we spread out, or group together?”

“Could go either way,” John said. “There’s pros and cons to each. Transporters make the spreading out somewhat immaterial— it doesn’t take that long to get anywhere in the city, except for a few areas that we wouldn’t live in anyway because it’s inconvenient. But in case of emergency, the transporters might go out. So it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. If we get, like, hit by an asteroid or something, I sort of feel like it won’t matter where everybody is.”

“Mm,” Rodney said. He made that odd laughing noise he sometimes did, that didn’t indicate humor so much as that he was going to say something he thought might be unexpected. “I will say, Ma— er, Colonel, you have the distinction of being my most successful roommate-whatever to date. Everyone else who’s had to live in close proximity to me for any period of time has at the very least expressed a desire to kill me. Many have actually attempted it.”

“If I had to trip over your shit in the living room,” John said dryly, “I’d probably feel differently. And maybe it’s that there are no stereos on Atlantis. Or, well, weren’t. Oh shit. I know what your taste in music’s like. Never mind, I wanna live far away from you.”

“Oh now mister Gin and Juice has a problem, huh?” McKay threw his hands up.

“It wasn’t my iPod,” John said. 

“That’s a good song,” Lorne said.

“Thank you, I know,” John said. 

“We don’t have to listen to it every time we take the jumper out, though,” Rodney said. 

“Gentlemen,” Elizabeth said. 

“I suggest,” Beckett said, “that we all simply take the quarters we prefer best and if that results in us either being clustered close together or spread widely, we let the chips fall as they may.”

Elizabeth turned to John. “As the safety and security of the base is your concern, do you agree with this?”

“Yeah,” John said, “that probably makes the most sense.” 

 

 

After the meeting John waited an hour or so to track Rodney down. He found him in their quarters— they were bunking together, since the ship was crowded. In bunk beds. Really narrow ones. They were about the size of the beds on Atlantis, but Rodney complained more about them; the lower one gave him claustrophobia, the upper made him worried he’d fall off. 

John had allayed his fears the first night by making a blanket fort out of the lower bunk (prompted by Rodney bitching about how cold the room was, and his own worry about surveillance cameras), then sucking his dick in it until Rodney forgot his own name. “Blanket forts are way cooler as adults,” John had said, and then he’d fucked Rodney through the mattress, slow and long and sweet enough that Rodney had come a second time. After Rodney had fallen asleep, John had cleaned up in the head down the hall, then climbed up into the top bunk to sleep there. But he’d left the blanket fort intact. 

He’d made Nancy a blanket fort, back when they were first dating. It had been her idea, actually, but he’d done much of the complicated construction work. And it had been awesome. They’d spent three days together over a long weekend, mostly just fucking in the pillow fort. It was a long time since John had had so few cares. 

Rodney was at the tiny desk that folded out of the wall, frowning at his laptop. He’d grown addicted to the Internet again in the short time they’d been Earthside. John had checked his email once, realized there was stuff in there he’d never get through, and had closed out of it. Then he’d watched a video of a cat jumping into a box, and the box falling over. Then he’d given up on the Internet again, delightful as the video had been. 

“I miss the Internet,” Rodney said mournfully as John slid the door shut behind himself. 

“I know,” John said, “you said that.”

“Can you blame me?” Rodney asked, gesticulating.

John toed his unlaced boots off and crawled into the blanket fort. “Yes,” he said, a little cranky. It wasn’t warm in the blanket fort yet, but if he sat in there a minute, it would be.

Rodney’s face appeared at the blanket fort entrance. “Are you taking your pants off?” he asked, a little eagerly. 

“Have I succeeded in giving you a Pavlovian arousal response to blanket forts?” John asked, smirking. 

Rodney blinked. “Maybe,” he said. He was taking his shoes off. 

“I came here to talk to you,” John said, but Rodney was already crawling in, unfastening his pants, opening his jacket, and he pushed John back on the bed, straddling his lap and pinning his hands over his head. 

“So talk or whatever,” Rodney said, nuzzling at the edge of his jaw, pushing his head back. He let go of John’s hands and pushed his t-shirt up. 

“Ahh,” John exclaimed as Rodney bit his nipple. “Jeez, man.”

Rodney nuzzled at his armpit, which made him flinch ticklishly, then captured his ribcage between his big hands and was licking his way back down his sternum, mapping out John’s abdomen with his tongue. “What are you doing, you nut?” John asked, twitching as Rodney scraped his teeth along John’s lowest rib. 

“I could lick you all over,” Rodney murmured. “The way you look— mmm— almost makes up for the lack of Internet porn currently in my life.”

“What?” John said, in mocking incredulity. “There’s porn— on the Internet? The Information Superhighway is just so much smut?”

“Mm,” Rodney said happily, holding both hips in a firm grip and nosing his way down from John’s belly button. “God, you have no fat.”

“Fat holds your skin on,” John pointed out. “Everybody has fat, or they die.”

“I dunno,” Rodney said, peeling John’s pants down, biting at the point of his hipbone. John twitched a little, at that, not just ticklish but starting to get pretty turned-on. “There isn’t much.”

“Holds my skin on,” John said, twitching again as Rodney licked a stripe across his lower belly, well below his belly button, just above his pubic hair. “Aagh!”

Rodney sucked in the head of his cock, pulling his pants down farther as he wriggled into position in the tiny bed. “Hmmm,” he said happily, and John shivered and writhed a bit at the unexpected heat and wetness and vibration. Rodney set to work on him with efficient purpose, and John shivered and began to melt. 

“This isn’t why I came here,” John tried again, though Rodney’s mouth and hands already had him right on the edge of becoming nonverbal. 

“Then you shouldn’t have gone into the Sex Fort,” Rodney pulled off for a second to say, before attacking him again with renewed intensity.

“I didn’t realize,” John said, then had to stop to gasp at what Rodney was doing. “God, Rodney, I—“ 

“You built it,” Rodney said, sucking on his fingers, then sliding them down to rub at John’s asshole. 

“You,” John said, but Rodney wasn’t listening, pulling his pants even farther down to push one thigh up and get his face right down in there, rimming John’s asshole with his tongue. “Agh!”

“You say the sweetest things,” Rodney murmured, tonguing him for a moment longer until John shivered and opened up with a sigh. Rodney licked back up to John’s balls and slid a fingertip delicately into his asshole. 

John gave up entirely on talking and let himself enjoy it as Rodney took him apart. Rodney got him right up to the edge, panting and gasping and writhing, so close, then backed him off a little and murmured, “Can I fuck you?”

“Yes,” John gasped, “God, oh, yes,” Rodney could probably have asked if he could shoot him and he’d’ve said yes, anything, he needed so badly to come, and Rodney had his pants down and got John turned over on his hands and knees before John could even finish the fragmentary sentence. They still didn’t do this very much, though Rodney had learned to at least not obviously handle John like he was made of cracked glass on this particular issue. 

John threw his head back as Rodney pushed into him from behind, one long sticky-slick push, then a moment’s hesitation, but John was so turned-on, so desperate for it, that he didn’t really need any time to catch up. “Fuck, _do_ it,” John said, and Rodney started fucking him, hard and fast and OK Rodney was as turned-on as John was, and John was pretty fucking turned on and this was going to be over really quick because the angle was absolutely perfect and Rodney was hitting him right— there— every— time— 

The way John’s hands were braced against the headboard meant he couldn’t reach down and grab his cock; Rodney was holding his hips so he could pull himself in harder and faster, nobody was touching John’s cock at all but it was _so good, Rodney,_ John found himself saying, panting mindlessly, _oh God, that’s so good, that’s so fucking good, that’s holy— fucking— fuck— yes— fuck—  yes—  fuck me— yes— fuck me— fuck me— fuck me— oh fuck— yes_ — John was coming, a slow deep rolling orgasm that felt like it was turning him inside-out. Rodney clapped a hand over his mouth and held him, rocking him through it, still fucking him like he was helpless to hold still, jerking and twitching and oh, that was because Rodney was coming too, a hot pulse inside him, teeth gritted and breath harsh in John’s ear.

It took John a moment to catch on that Rodney was covering his mouth because he’d been making the most inhuman noises. He shivered in Rodney’s grip, heart pounding, hands wrapped around Rodney’s forearms that were holding him up. God Rodney had strong arms, broad shoulders, big hands, big cock, he’d just made John come like a woman just from fucking, and John was shaking all over now, hollowed-out, shattered, he’d never been noisy in bed, this wasn’t— he didn’t know what this was. 

Rodney eased him down onto the bed, kissing his neck, letting go of his mouth, and pulled out of him gently, and John lay there on his side and thought _that is a cock sliding out of my body, a man just fucked me and came inside me, holy fuck this is the most ridiculously delayed freakout ever what the_ fuck _is wrong with me._ “That was amazing,” Rodney said breathlessly. “That was the hottest thing I’ve ever fucking done.” 

“Holy shit,” John said weakly, shaking, weird little aftershocks still zinging through him and he’d just come so hard even his dick was confused, twitching limply against his trembling thighs. “I didn’t know— I didn’t know that was a thing.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Rodney said, and his tone was frankly awed. “And it’s a thing, in porn, I’ve seen it— and I figured only sex gods could do it, and holy shit, you’re a sex god, Sheppard.” He shoved himself up on an elbow— oh God, they were spooning, John hadn’t even noticed— and looked over at John. “I can’t believe it, the first dude I ever managed to bag is a goddamned fucking sex god.”

The first, John thought dimly, like there was a long list ahead of him, like he was the first of many, the preliminary notch in the bedpost, the starter model. Also, _bag_ did not sound complimentary. It just added to the feminizing, like John— no, _Sheppard_ , Rodney wouldn’t even call him by his fucking _name_ — was some sort of conquest, like the girls his high school contemporaries had eagerly transformed from “prudes” to “sluts” by a judicious combo of booze, peer pressure, and dehumanizing bragging. Rodney was going to brag, later, that the first guy he’d ever banged had been a pretty flyboy who he could make come like a woman.

 “I don’t feel like a sex god,” John said unevenly, shivering, and he still had his pants around his knees and his shirt rucked up under his jacket and his asshole was stretched-out, fucked and used and wet, and he was lying in a sticky puddle of spunk and he sort of felt like a whore. And shit, they’d forgotten to use a condom and that was the load Rodney’d shot in him that was making his fucked-out hole feel so slippery.

“You’re totally a sex god,” Rodney said, and academically John could appreciate that this was afterglow, Rodney was genuinely being affectionate toward him, but it just felt to him like Rodney was bragging about his own sexual prowess and how great he was at fucking and John was just his first of many conquests. 

Rodney was kissing his neck and his shoulder, and John flinched away a little and pushed himself up on unsteady arms, tugging his shirt back down over his chest from where Rodney’d rucked it up clear to his collarbones, like he was a girl whose tits Rodney had wanted to fondle while he fucked her from behind. _You’re being crazy,_ John thought, but it didn’t help. 

He pushed the blanket out of the way and got to his feet, shivering in disgust as come dribbled down his thigh. “No condom, huh?” he asked, and it came out tighter, angrier than he’d meant it to. He pulled his pants up, grimacing. Well, with the number of physicals they’d endured, it was unlikely that there was any danger of giving one another diseases this way, but still. He’d never even fucked his _wife’s_ ass without a condom, she’d thought it was too gross. 

“Shit,” Rodney said, “I’m sorry, I forgot.” He laughed nervously. “Uh, I hope you don’t get gay-pregnant.”

“Yeah,” John said tightly, buckling his belt. He was sticky and his thighs were greasy and Jesus he felt like a whore. “You should probably wash, you don’t wanna get a UTI.” 

“Oh,” Rodney said, “huh, I guess.” 

Taking a shower in the middle of the day would be weird but John really didn’t want to walk around the rest of the day with Rodney’s jizz dripping down his thighs. He could probably clean up unremarked in the head down the hall, well enough anyway. John went to his duffel and dug out a fresh pair of underwear, grabbed a washcloth, trying unsuccessfully not to move with sharp angry jerks, and wrapped it all up in his uniform jacket so it wouldn’t be obvious what he was doing. 

“You said you came here to talk to me about something,” Rodney said, sort of meekly. 

Yeah, John had come to suggest that they look for quarters near each other so they could more easily visit one another without being remarked upon. “It wasn’t important,” he said, shoving his feet back into his boots and sliding the door open.

 

“Hey.” John blinked awake. “Hey, Sheppard.”

He rolled over, disoriented— right, bunk, ship, Daedalus. He’d gone to bed at around 2300 ship time, no sign of Rodney in their room. Rodney’s head was just at the level of the top bunk, considering him worriedly— he’d left the little table lamp on for Rodney when he’d gone to bed. “What,” he said blurrily, “what is it.” His watch was looped over the bedpost. It was 0200. That woke him up, and he shoved up onto an elbow. “Problem?”

“No,” Rodney said, “listen, I know you’re mad at me and I really need to know why, I’m really bad at figuring this shit out. Is it about the condom? Because I really, really didn’t mean to do that, and I’m really sorry.”

John sat up and rubbed his face. “You woke me up at 2 in the morning to _talk_.”

“I’m sorry,” Rodney said, “I got wrapped up in something and lost track of time. But I’ve been worrying about it all damn day, Sheppard. What’s wrong?” 

“I’m not mad at you,” John said. He lay back down. “Go to sleep.”

“No,” Rodney said, and there was a clunk and the bedframe shook and John realized Rodney was climbing up to the top bunk. 

“Jeez,” he said, but there was no avoiding it, Rodney settled into the bed and wrapped himself around John. Sleepy as he was, John had no remaining resistance, and sighed as Rodney snuggled up to him. “I said I’m not mad at you.”

“You sure seemed mad,” Rodney said, shoving his cold nose into the crook of John’s ear and neck. It was fucking freezing in here and there weren’t enough blankets in the world.

“I wasn’t mad,” John protested, and then Rodney slid cold hands down under the blankets and up John’s shirt and he bit down on an almost-squeak. “You bastard,” he said.

“C’mon,” Rodney wheedled.

“Fuck off,” John said, but he relaxed a little into Rodney’s arms. His hands were cold, and now John’s torso had pretty much cooled to match them, but the rest of him was warm and would probably make up for it.

“At least let’s take this to the blanket fort,” Rodney said.

“You’re not luring me into your Sex Lair,” John mumbled, shivering with cold and the first stirrings of arousal. He’d decided, this afternoon, that they really had to tone down their relationship, had to step down the frequency of these little trysts, but, well, shit. Rodney was hard, pressing against him from behind, and he smelled like toothpaste and shampoo and himself, and great, now John’s dick was confused again. 

“I won’t make you have sex with me,” Rodney said, sighing. “It’ll just be warmer.”

“I was plenty warm until you got here with your icy hands,” John grumbled. But he sat up, and after Rodney had climbed down he followed, bringing his pillow and the softest and least scratchy of the _Daedalus_ blankets. Inside the blanket fort it was much warmer and more comfortable, and he settled into the curve of Rodney’s body and dropped back off to sleep much more happily. And yeah, they were totally going to have morning sex. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rodney caught up to him halfway down the hallway near Atlantis' control tower. “Major,” he said breathlessly. John half-turned and raised an eyebrow. Rodney rolled his eyes, but flushed even pinker. “Er, Colonel.”

John forgave him with a half-smile as he fell into step alongside. “Yeah?”

“What did you think of the quarters in Holloway Tower?” 

They were naming the towers after the casualties from the great battle against the Wraith, which John couldn’t argue with. It wouldn’t have been his choice, but it was better than the random number designations the sciencey members of the exploration teams had saddled them with. Holloway had been a Marine, killed by flaming debris from a wrecked dart. Not the worst of all possible deaths, on that day.

“They seemed nice,” John said, noncommital.

“I was thinking of snagging the one with the northern exposure,” Rodney said. “Thing is, it has its own bathroom and even a sitting room, and it’s really nice, but it shares the balcony— the balcony wraps around to the eastern side. Did you look at that one?”

“I didn’t,” John said. He didn’t know what to decide. Moving in right next to Rodney— he’d been thinking they should stop doing whatever it was they were doing, but it was impossible to stick to that when Rodney was actually physically present. Only distance would let him do that.

“It’s a little smaller,” Rodney said, “just one room, plus attached bathroom, but it’s a big bedroom, room for a couch and a couple chairs if you like. You could even fit your mini-fridge in there.” 

“Hm,” John said. 

Rodney put his hand on John’s arm. “Hey,” he said softer, slowing their pace. They were coming up on the control room, and there’d be people in the hallways up ahead, but there weren’t here. 

John stopped, and faced him. “What?” 

“If you want to keep doing this,” Rodney said, and waved his hand back and forth between them, “then that would be the safest way. We’ve been living next to each other, it wouldn’t be weird if we wanted to stay as neighbors. Especially not since there’s another room in that hallway that Teyla’s looking at. It’d just be a team thing. And that would make perfect sense. And nobody would ever see you leaving my room at a weird time, or vice versa.”

John nodded, chewing his lip. “Yeah,” he said. 

“I sense hesitation,” Rodney said, mouth crooking downward. _Shit. Shit, shit, shit_ , this was why John couldn’t say no to him. “You don’t want to keep doing this.”

“All it takes is one person with a grudge,” John said quietly. Before the promotion, part of him had been willing to say fuck it, and give up on the Air Force; they’d been planning on booting him anyway. But now it was obvious he had a career again. 

“I don’t have a problem keeping a secret,” Rodney said. “It doesn’t matter if there’s someone with a grudge, there’s nothing for them to find.”

John folded his arms and looked at Rodney. “And you’d really be fine, living like that. Living so that there’s nothing for anyone to find.”

“It’s all right,” Rodney said. “No, it really is, Sheppard. I’m pretty used to this.”

“Why?” John asked, baffled. “Why would you be used to this?”

“Pretty much everyone I’ve ever slept with has wanted me to keep it secret,” Rodney said.

“Why?” John asked. He shook his head. “I really don’t understand.”

Rodney’s smile was sweet, but twisted a little tightly. “Well,” he said, “I know I’m a catch, and all, genetically speaking, and appearance-wise I’m perfectly reasonable-looking, but the whole package at once can be, you know, a little _much_ for some people.” He shrugged a little. “People… haven’t exactly bragged about bagging me. Most have just wanted me to… keep it quiet. You know. Not make a fuss.” He shrugged again, and his smile had shaded unmistakably toward bitter. “Not… be seen with them in public.”

John shook his head again. “Why would they do that?”

Rodney shrugged. “I’m kind of… a lot, for some people to handle.” John realized he was genuinely trying to look unbothered. “Sometimes I… previous lovers have… have informed me that I’m kind of embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing,” John said, disbelieving. He was seized with a sudden overwhelming desire to find everyone who’d ever told Rodney he was embarrassing and punch each one of them in the face. Why would you want to sleep with Rodney if you didn’t find his various bizarre obnoxiousnesses endearing? 

Rodney waved his hand airily. “You know,” he said.

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” John said. “I can’t do that to you, Rodney.”

“Do what?” Rodney asked, face twisting in annoyance. “Do what we’ve already been doing for pretty much a year? Because what we’ve been doing has been just fine with me.”

It _had_ been just about a year, come to think of it. John squinted, considering that. “I just don’t… don’t want to be just another jerk.”

“There _have_ been a lot,” Rodney conceded, then snapped his attention up to John’s face again. “Hey! But you’re not. You’re way nicer to me than a lot of people.”

John started walking again, and bumped his shoulder against Rodney’s. “Guess I’m losin’ my edge,” he said. 

“So, you want that room or not?” Rodney asked.

John shook his head, looking down, but said, “Sure.” Against his better judgement, against his rational assessment of the situation. But his instinct said to do it. And on reflection, it was probably right. He’d probably cave under stress, even if he resolved not to sleep with Rodney anymore, and in a moment of weakness he’d be right back over there, and if he lived way out on another pier his chances of getting caught at it were a lot higher. 

Of course, his ability to resist was going to be a lot lower.

 


	4. Lt. Colonel Life-or-Death Math Puzzles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this chapter is really slow-paced and doesn't have a good payoff-- no porn-- and is mostly talking-- but here it is; moderate exposition and a lot of slice-of-life Atlantis stuff. I don't have any beta-readers so I'm reliant on my own terrible instincts for pacing here. Bear with me.  
> Warnings for irreverent military humor.

 

John checked his watch as he came out of the armory and grimaced. Rodney’d asked him to come by the labs around 1400 and it was already 1415. He keyed his radio. “Sheppard to McKay,” he said. No answer. He took the stairs two at a time and repeated the hail. 

“Sheppard, McKay’s probably off-radio because he’s doing an orientation session,” Simpson’s voice said, a little crackly. 

“Shit,” John said, chewing his lip. 

“Is it an emergency? I could get him,” she said. The scientists had crappy radio protocol. But it was about dead last on the list of things John cared about. Maybe he could beat some sense into the new kids. He wasn’t exactly observing protocol himself, though, so it was probably a lost cause.

“Nah,” John said, “he asked me to stop by around 1400. I guess that was before the session. Wonder if he still needs me to come by. Over.”

“Oh,” Simpson said. “No, he wanted you to come to the session. He’s been working with them for over an hour.” 

“Oh,” John said, “I see. Thanks, Simpson. Over.”

He hit the transporter screen and popped out near the labs, and trotted down the hallway at a decent clip. He had to get back into running properly— he’d worked out plenty on the Daedalus but the running had to be on treadmills and just wasn’t the same. He couldn’t take proper strides on a treadmill, couldn’t engage his core as well as real running, and he preferred not to run on perfectly flat surfaces anyway, not for the increased resistance from hills but from the work he could do on balance. He knew fine well that was about the only real edge he had athletically— not size, not power, not even agility, but perfect command of balance. 

Though at the moment, because the _Daedalus’s_ weight room was excellent, he had cosmetically perfect arms, traps, and pecs, and it was kind of appealing to his vanity. Maybe they could get the weight room here up to that standard. Not that he needed to be particularly pretty, but damn. And the way it made McKay’s mouth completely disconnect from his brain whenever John crossed his arms while wearing short sleeves was really, really gratifying. 

He swung around the door into the lab and nearly ran into the back of somebody. The lab was full of people, sitting and standing and perching and leaning and all, now, staring at him. McKay was up by the whiteboard and it was titled, in enormous block caps, THINGS THAT WILL KILL YOU. 

“So good of you to join us, Colonel,” Rodney said. 

“Been kinda busy, McKay,” John said easily. “I, um, I have my own orientation with these guys, comin’ up.” He waved around the room: they were all scientists he didn’t know, so it was pretty easy to tell they were new folks. 

“I understand that,” McKay said. “I just thought I’d have you stop by for a couple of specific things that _I_ want to tell them, that you probably won’t cover in your orientation.” He waggled his hand, and John correctly interpreted the gesture as beckoning him up to the front, so he went up and leaned against the lab bench Rodney was standing in front of. He was kind of, well, not really dressed for this, in battered BDU trousers and unlaced boots and a plain black undershirt with a hole near the hem, and he was smudged with dirt and gun oil. They’d been doing inventory and maintenance in the armory, and John had practically rolled around in the positively luxurious quantity of supplies they had. 

“Um,” John said, “okay.”

“The main thing I want to instill in your swollen egg-heads is that the military here aren’t just a bunch of dumb grunts,” McKay said. John gave him a startled look, exaggerating for comedic effect, and some of the scientists’ faces twitched as they tried not to react. Oh, McKay was breaking them in properly. “No, most of them are on this mission because they’re perhaps a bit smarter than you might expect.”

“This makes my job very hard,” John said. “Nobody likes a smart Marine. It violates the natural order of things.”

“Yes, well,” McKay said. “That’s not my point. My point is, I know that each of you out there has spent your whole life being a special genius snowflake, and you’re all going to squabble amongst yourselves over who is the specialest geniusest snowflake of them all. This is futile, since it is I who am the specialest geniusest snowflake of all of you— I am the Most High Nerd and don’t you forget it— but that’s not my point. My point is, the people with guns whose job it is to shoot things for your protection are not in the place you would expect in this genius hierarchy. They are not always at the bottom of it. Do not dismiss the things they say, and do not ever make the mistake of thinking they’re not going to be able to follow your genius-speak. A brush cut does not mean no brain underneath it.”

John crossed his arms, letting his eyebrows communicate his surprise and pleasure. He hadn’t expected Rodney to put in a good word; he’d been planning on the long grim uphill battle himself. Maybe it would take, from this source. 

“This one, for example, qualified for Mensa but never joined and won’t tell me why,” McKay said. 

“Hey,” John said, truly annoyed, “don’t just go _telling_ people that, you’ll blow my cover!” 

“Yes, well, Mr. Life or Death Math Puzzles—“ 

“That’s _Colonel_ Life or Death Math Puzzles to you,” John said smugly. 

“Oh my God,” Rodney said, rolling his eyes, and turned back to the assembled scientists, who all looked like they really badly wanted to laugh but didn’t dare. “So there’s a lot of complicated military etiquette and you don’t really have to learn it all, but learn enough that you can fool them into thinking you’re making an effort and they won’t hold it against you. Just don’t confuse the zoomies and jarheads, they get funny about it, and I’ll get Sheppard here to draw you a real quick diagram of what ranks mean what so you get some idea of who it’s a good idea to listen to and who you really _have_ to listen to.” 

John tilted his head, conceding McKay’s point. “I actually already have a slide made up with all the rank insignia,” he said. 

“They don’t need to know all of them,” McKay said. “Just the basic shapes. Like, the ones with the Vs are enlisted, and once they have a big pile of Vs they’re important. That kind of thing.”

John laughed. “Never thought of it that way,” he said. He honestly couldn’t remember what it had been like before he instinctively knew what all the insignia meant. 

“And the ones with just one little thing, like yours, might be not important but are probably really important and out here you can’t really tell,” Rodney went on. “Oh, you’re not wearing your thing.” His eyes lingered on John’s arms and John gave him a squint-eyed warning look. “It’s easy when they’re in the fancy uniforms with all the gold braid and stuff, you can tell who’s important by how much crap they have everywhere. But out here I don’t think they ever wear the fancy uniforms, so you’re forced to consider small details. And if you call somebody the wrong rank it’s a deadly insult.”

“It’s like calling someone Miss when she’s a PhD,” John said, screwing up his face in distaste. “Like, oh, those seven years of your life’s work are so trivial as to be beneath my notice.”

That had seemed to make some sense to them, because several heads were nodding thoughtfully. “Anyway,” McKay said, “my point is, they’re not like janitors or security guards, they’re highly-trained and at least moderately intelligent people who have jobs that include but are not solely keeping you alive as best they can. So don’t embarrass me.” He held out a whiteboard marker to John, who took it blankly. Right. Rank insignia. 

“I should also mention,” John said, “that Dr. McKay here is not just the head of science and research. He also is on my ‘gate team. Which means he spends time regularly at the firing range and has been certified on a number of weapons.” He found an empty space on the whiteboard and started drawing headings on it. He made three columns, one for Marines/Navy enlisted, one for Air Force/Army enlisted, then one for commissioned ranks for all four. He paused to turn back to the group. “I’m going to insist on all of you recertifying on at least the .9mm pistols with me, regardless of what other qualifications you may have. I’m not going to have anyone ejecting the magazine in a panic as a Wraith advances on them.” He slid his gaze over toward Rodney, who blushed. 

“I should’ve made Teyla promise,” Rodney muttered. John smirked, then turned back to the whiteboard, starting to draw the chevrons for the Air Force enlisted.  

“I promise guns are fun,” John said. “But if anybody shoots me again, I’m not going to be nearly as good-natured about it as I was last time.”

“Oh my God, that really happened?” a voice said, and John glanced back to see that it was one of the women at the closest lab bench who had spoken. At his look, she said, “I heard a story that one of the scientists shot you last year but I didn’t believe it.”

“Oh,” John said, “it happened. If you expect it to go bang and it goes click instead…”

“Keep your weapon pointed downrange and call for help,” Rodney filled in. “Don’t _point it at your instructor_ and ask him why it’s not working.”

John shook his head and went back to drawing. “I lost a lot of blood,” he said. “It wasn’t very nice. I wasn’t happy. It really, really hurt.” 

“If any of you kills any of the military guys or gets them killed by doing something stupid, I will murder you with my own hands,” Rodney said. 

“There ya go,” John said, moving on to the Air Force noncoms. “I’m not expecting you all to become crack shots, I just don’t want you to die when you could’ve saved yourselves. I can’t save everybody, I know there’ll be fatalities, I just don’t want to lose anybody to preventable stuff, or put anybody in a situation where just a little more training could’ve gotten them out of it.” 

“Good enough,” Rodney said as John moved on to the commissioned officers. “Just gimme the basic idea of the insignia.”

“Fine, fine,” John said. “Jeez.” He wasn’t about to lovingly illustrate a major’s oak leaves or anything. He sketched captain’s bars, did a vaguely leaf-shaped squiggle and wrote “(gold)” next to it for a major, copied the squiggle and wrote “(silver)” for Lt. Col., then drew a really crude Colonel’s eagle and wrote “(probably an asshole)” next to it.

Rodney stepped in and peered at what he’d written. “Oh my God,” he said, “you can’t write that.”

“Sure I can,” John said. “My name’s not on this. You can’t prove it was me.” Under “(silver)” next to the Lt. Col. scribble-insignia he wrote “incredibly attractive and hard-working”. Next to the major insignia he wrote “sort of important”, next to the captain’s bars he wrote “probably not as important as s/he thinks” and next to the lieutenant’s bar he wrote “snot-nosed cannon fodder”. 

“This is great,” Rodney said, sounding fascinated. 

“I didn’t write any of this,” John said, drawing a skull and crossbones next to the Marine sergeant, and adding the caption “TERRIFYING”. “You didn’t even see me, I wasn’t here.” He added a little footnote for warrant officers, captioning the scribbled dotted-bar insignia “will lose your paycheck if displeased”. “I’m just some weird guy in a black t-shirt, ran in here for no reason and went nuts with the whiteboard marker.” Corporals he labeled “dangerously wiseassed”, then privates “also snot-nosed cannon fodder but less gung-ho. Do not kiss them on the mouth.”

“God,” Rodney said, actually giggling, “you’re really hopeless.”

“Listen,” John said, straightening up and turning around, capping the marker. “We’re not jackbooted thugs. We’ve all been pretty highly trained and have worked hard to get here too, just like you. A lot of us are here because we’re smart and don’t fit in back on Earth. Just like you. We all have jobs to do, beyond just keeping you lot safe. Show us a little respect, we’ll do the same for you, and we’ll try to keep as many of all of us alive as long as possible.”

Rodney took the whiteboard back from him, and set it down. “I actually had one other thing I wanted to ask,” he said. 

“Erase all that before we leave,” John said, pointing at the board. “I don’t need Caldwell seeing it.”

“Of course,” Rodney said, “I’m not an idiot.”

John rolled his eyes for the benefit of the crowd, figuring it couldn’t hurt to win them over a bit. “Then what did you want to know?” he asked. 

“I’ve had questions about military discipline and so on,” Rodney said. “A lot of our newer recruits have come to us pretty much fresh from civilian life, so they’re worried about being held to the same rules, and so on.”

John nodded. “I’ll address that in our orientation,” he said. “The short answer is no, there’s an Atlantis-specific code of conduct that applies to civilians and military alike, and while there are other laws that the military are subject to based on their own code of conduct, they don’t affect the civilians.”

“But what if, say, we want to date a member of the military?” The asker was a young man, with a slightly mannered inflection and an impeccably stylish haircut. John blinked. No, he hadn’t suddenly acquired gaydar, the guy was just pretty unsubtle. Probably on purpose; why hide if you had to? John spared a microsecond for a feeling he realized was jealousy. _Weird._ He dismissed it.

“Ah,” John said. “Well, I have a whole nice prepared thing on that, but pretty much, that entire section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice is unenforceable in another galaxy. Since our military isn’t even entirely made up of US forces, it’s also problematic. I have official notice that it’s kind of up to me to work that out with Weir. Unofficially, though, I’m supposed to pretty much keep that stuff off any Earthside radar.” He shrugged. “In short, I want to be notified of relevant things— like, say, relationships or recently-ended relationships that should probably affect the duty roster so as to avoid undue strain or confusion— but please don’t ask me to be an official witness at your gay wedding, as that looks bad on paper. I’ll totally make a toast, off the record, though.”

“And what about… the more traditional members of the military?” the young man persisted. “What if they… object?”

“I’ll have none of that shit,” John said grimly. “I do not tolerate homophobia, hate speech, or any of that nonsense. In the screening process for volunteers it was made pretty plain that shit like that won’t fly. Not just on-base, of course— aliens have weird ideas of what’s polite and if you’re in such a homophobic panic you can’t think straight, you’re probably going to get your entire ‘gate team killed. If you have any complaints, you come to me. If you’re too intimidated or whatever to talk to me, or I’m in a coma or something because that seems to happen a lot, talk to Major Lorne. He was raised by lesbians so he’s super good at feelings. Just try to be polite.”

 

Rodney wrapped up the orientation pretty quickly, and John wandered over to the box of Mysterious Small Ancient Devices and poked some of them curiously. The young man who had spoken came over as the session broke up. “You’re serious that it’s okay for your guys to be gay,” he said, a little challengingly, leaning on the edge of the lab table. 

John looked up from the thing he was playing with, which he rather thought might be related to analyzing crystals. “Yeah,” he said. “I really am.”

“I had a super-repressed military boyfriend when I was an undergrad,” the man went on, still reading as a little aggressive.

John nodded, and looked down. “ROTC?” he asked. 

“Yeah,” the man said.

“There’s a lot of pressure on you in ROTC,” John said. “You’re a normal undergrad, and you’re supposed to be able to just live your life like normal, but then you’re also being indoctrinated into the military and doing all this crazy shit, and it’s… really not normal. I’m sorry if he was a dick to you, and it’s not like that out here. But I did ROTC and even without being gay, it was a mindfuck.”

“So you’re not gay,” the man said. 

John put down the gadget and looked at him. “It’s funny, I’m the only person on this entire expedition that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell still applies to,” he said. “It’s a political thing, and politics doesn’t care about this mission because it doesn’t know about it. But politics knows about me. So I gotta be above reproach.”

“So you _are_ gay,” the man said.

“So I am the one person nobody can ask, and the one person who can’t tell anybody,” John said, a little exasperated. “So I wouldn’t tell you either way. That’s not what I’m here for.”

“Hey,” McKay said, “that whole lecture was not an invitation for you to hit on the military commander, Micklesworth.”

“Michaelson,” the man said, annoyed.

“Whatever,” Rodney said. “Quit being a pest and beat it.”

“I think this thing is for checking the integrity of control crystal circuits,” John said mildly, handing the gadget to Rodney as Michaelson obligingly left, though with a strange backwards glance. Shit, the guy _had_ been hitting on him. John was so bad at this. No, he couldn’t have been.

“God,” Rodney said, still staring daggers after Michaelson. “I am going to make you a chastity belt.”

“He wasn’t hitting on me,” John said. They were gonna have to have a talk about jealousy.

Rodney stared at him. “Of course he was,” he said. “Jesus.”

John sighed, and put his head down on the lab table. “Did you erase the whiteboard?”

“Not yet,” Rodney said.

John stood up. “I’m going to,” he said, and went in. He did a thorough job, then scribbled over the few places where you could still see traces of his drawings, and erased again until they were definitely gone. “There,” he said. 

“Was Lorne really raised by lesbians?” Rodney asked. 

“Yeah,” John said absently, fitting the cap back on the marker. “He had, like, the happiest childhood anyone’s ever had, too.”

“Really?” Rodney had his tablet in his hand, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Oh yeah, it was about time for lunch.

“Yeah,” John said, following him out to the nearest transporter. “He had two moms, and his biological father was half of the gay couple who lived next door, and basically they were like one giant family, with him and his sister, and their moms mostly had custody but their dads babysat and came over all the time, and it was like, I sort of never thought anybody had an actually-happy childhood but as far as I could tell the guy wasn’t shitting me.”

“God,” Rodney said. “Yeah, I kind of always figured people who said they had happy childhoods were in denial.”

John shrugged and hit the button for the transporter by the mess hall. “My childhood wasn’t that bad,” he said. 

“Mine sucked,” Rodney said. “I mean, I guess at least I didn’t grow up poor. You grew up poor, didn’t you?”

John stared at him as the transporter doors opened. “Define ‘poor’,” he said, though he was pretty sure that his background didn’t fit with anyone’s definition of ‘poor’ in any galaxy at all. Unless, of course, you only measured emotional wealth, but who did that when there was money?

“You know,” Rodney said. His expression changed. “That was you, right?”

“I don’t think I’ve said anything like that,” John said carefully. He really wasn’t up for the discussion of his background. It always got awkward. At least it was reassuring, to know that Rodney hadn’t pried into his personal background any more while on Earth. He bet Elizabeth had, though.

“Huh,” Rodney said, wandering out of the transporter. “I wonder who that was, then.”

“Zelenka maybe,” John said, nodding politely at a pair of Marine noncommissioned officers coming out of the mess hall. 

“No, no,” Rodney said, “he wasn’t poor, he was actively oppressed, there’s a difference. I swear it was you. With the white trash midwest upbringing and helping your Ma darn socks and all. Isn’t that why you’re good at sewing?”

“No,” John said. He’d learned sewing from the housekeeper, during the hours he’d spent hiding from his brother’s bullying friends. It was how he’d learned to cook, too, and why he could hack decent conversational Spanish despite having studied French in school. “I definitely never called my mother ‘Ma’ and I really don’t think I’d’ve ever referred to myself as poor white trash.”

“Oh,” Rodney said, and actually blushed a little. “I, er, might have filled that in myself.”

“We weren’t poor, Rodney,” John said. “You’re definitely thinking of someone else. I went to Catholic prep school, that’s not free.” Understatement of the century— it had been a pretty damn exclusive prep school, as it happened. Tuition was almost as much as for a university. 

“Lots of poor people go to Catholic school, though,” Rodney said, and John picked up a tray and reflected that it was probably only McKay who could argue with someone about that person’s own childhood and attempt to prove that they were wrong.

“Not this one,” John said. “Hey, fettucine. I’m not sick of Earth food yet, are you?”

“No,” Rodney said, “I’m still enjoying the novelty.” And hoarding MREs, John knew. His new room had a secret closet dedicated mostly to hoarding food and spare hard drives, and John wasn’t supposed to know about it but Atlantis never hid things from him. Also, his own room had the same layout. John’s secret closet was empty but he knew he’d come up with something to use it for eventually. 

John had just started loading up his tray when his earpiece blurted at him. He rolled his eyes, stepped out of line, and tapped it. “Sheppard,” he said. 

“Sir,” a somewhat frantic voice said, “sir, one of the new pilots is trapped inside Jumper Six and can’t remember how to shut it down.”

“Is it about to explode?” John asked.

“Uh… negative, sir,” the tech said. 

“Then I’ll be there in a moment. Everyone stay calm.”

“Do you need me?” Rodney asked, stepping out of the end of the line with his tray laden. 

John shook his head, glanced regretfully at his tray (which, so far, had only an apple and a bread roll on it), took the apple with him, left the tray, and took off. 

 

 

“Trouble?”

John jerked his head up out of his hands, where he’d been resting it for a moment to try and dull the ache behind his eyes. Caldwell. He swallowed down his alarmed reaction. “It’s technology you control with your _mind_ ,” he said, letting his incredulity and frustration shine through. “You just think about what you want it to do, and it _does it_. I can’t even understand how it’s possible to screw that up.”

Caldwell chuckled wryly. “Breaking in new people is always an exercise in amazing incompetence,” he said. 

John shook his head, blew out slowly through pursed lips, and pulled himself together. “Best and brightest,” he said, squinting a little against the pain. 

“They really are,” Caldwell said, sympathetic and earnest.

“Oh,” John said, “I know. Or they wouldn’t have come out here at all. I just, you know.”

“Have a little more sympathy for your old COs?” Caldwell asked. 

John regarded him for a long moment. “No, actually,” he said. “I was going to say I need to work on being more understanding of the artificial ATA carriers, because it plainly doesn’t work the same way for them as it does for me. As far as my old COs go? I have even less sympathy for most of them than I did before.” 

“Really,” Caldwell said. 

“Yeah,” John said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Don’t get me wrong, I had some good COs, but I appreciated that at the time. And this job isn’t all that much different from the job I just spent an entire year doing, except now I know I have reinforcements and materiel if I need them. The second-guessing and politics I could do without but it’s not like I didn’t expect them. I just didn’t really anticipate quite so much trouble with the ATA stuff.”

“The ATA stuff specifically,” Caldwell said. 

“Yeah,” John said. “Sometimes when I try to use something a fake-ATA user is currently manhandling there’s a bit of a backlash.” He let go of the bridge of his nose. Nothing was gonna touch this headache. It was probably about 50% due to having missed lunch, though. He’d barely eaten breakfast, missed lunch, the mess hall was shut down now for another four hours or so, and he had a meeting with Weir right before the mess hall was due to open again so he’d probably miss most of dinner too. 

“Backlash,” Caldwell said. “You mean, a physical one?”

“No,” John said hollowly, “I just get a brutal headache for a couple of hours. You ever had a migraine?”

“Oh,” Caldwell said. “Yes, actually. I don’t get them often but it’s no picnic.”

“Nope,” John said. “It’s not.” He squinted. “Light trails. My favorite.”

“Oh dear,” Caldwell said. “Colonel, should you go to the infirmary?”

“Nah,” John said, “I get these all the time now.” He glanced at his watch, needing to shut one eye so he could make out the dial. “I got almost four hours until my next meeting, so I’m gonna sit in a dark room and not talk to anybody until then. These usually blow over in an hour or two if I don’t do anything stupid.” 

“Don’t let me stop you,” Caldwell said, apparently sincere.

“Thanks,” John said, and managed to walk in a pretty straight line to the transporter.

He made it to his quarters with his eyes nearly shut, gritting his teeth against the spikes of pain that came from using the transporters, opening doors, dimming lights and the like. Beckett would probably be fascinated but at times like these John was never particularly interested in volunteering to be experimented on. 

It was only after he’d shut his door that he realized he’d forgotten to grab anything to eat. There were usually at least Powerbars and fruit set out at the mess hall betweentimes. Unlike McKay, John didn’t hoard food. Damn it, not even a Powerbar. 

He staggered to the bathroom, got a wet washcloth, pressed it over his eyes, and sat down on the edge of his bed. He stayed there for a minute or so, then decided to lie down. Something crinkled. He sat back up, pulled the washcloth off his eyes, and realized there was an MRE on his bed. 

Didn’t take a genius to figure out who’d left it. 

Despite the pain, John smiled, warmed a little by the attention.


	5. The Worst Kind of Weakness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> None of this chapter is from John's POV, it's all Lorne, Rodney, and Elizabeth.   
> That doesn't really make it any less sad. No sexytimes. The opposite of sexytimes. Sorry.

 

Lorne was starting to get the hang of Atlantis. He had an unusually well-expressed gene, apparently, especially among those who’d developed it artificially. They’d worked out the facility of various gene carriers and he was up pretty high. Still below Beckett in terms of sensitivity, but above him in terms of adeptness at most things. 

Sometimes the city buzzed at him, or whispered, or spoke. He’d mentioned it once, and one of the less-adept artificial carriers had looked at him like he was crazy. But another time, he’d been in the mess hall when something had activated in the ventilation system, and had involuntarily cringed at the inaudible buzz. Sheppard had been standing near him, and had noticed. 

“Oh,” he’d said, “hey, you felt that?”

“Yeah, sir,” Lorne had said. 

Sheppard had grinned. “Welcome to the club. Sometimes she talks to ya late at night too. Get used to it.”

At the moment Lorne was pretty much holding flashlights for the scientists. He and Sheppard were helping Zelenka and McKay explore some really complicated large system that they were almost completely sure wouldn’t kill anyone. The scientists rather thought this was the main control for the environmental sensors, some of which worked even in areas that had no power, and it was one of the projects Zelenka had been dying to work on, but they’d been on the verge of disaster so long there had been no time. He’d started working on it while McKay was gone, and now that the Daedalus’s first drop of new personnel and supplies was complete, McKay was in on it with him. 

“Welcome to human lightswitch duty,” Sheppard said, with some intricate eyebrow choreography. 

“Do you bring a book along, or what?” Lorne asked. So far he’d spent a lot of time in the Pegasus Galaxy bored, though if you averaged in the really cool shit he’d seen (like Atlantis itself) and removed the _really_ tedious journey on the Daedalus (If you had asked Lt. Evan Lorne ten years ago what it would be like to fly on a spaceship he would never in a million years have guessed _tedious_ ), it probably _still_ averaged out to way cooler than the time he’d spent on SG-11. 

“At the moment,” Sheppard said, “a tablet, theoretically to catch up on paperwork, but honestly, I’m enjoying the floor show.”

“The floor show,” Lorne echoed. Zelenka was muttering curses in some obscure language, McKay was getting shriller and shriller, and the two were mostly just talking circles around each other and trading insults. Probably insults. It was hard to follow.

“Oh yeah,” Sheppard said. “After a while you pick up which of the Czech words are descriptive and which are just insulting. Like, I’m pretty sure he just told McKay he had a tiny penis.”

“I said nothing of the sort,” Zelenka said, popping his head up over the console. “I have never seen McKay’s penis, nor do I wish to.”

“And before that you compared his mother to a cordless drill,” Sheppard said. 

“Leave my mother out of this,” McKay snapped. 

“I _did_ leave your mother out of this!” Zelenka said, gesturing wildly. “I have never _one time_ mentioned your mother!”

“He’s totally lying,” Sheppard drawled. “He said she had a lot of torque but not much finesse.”

“Hush, you,” McKay said, and threw a screwdriver at Sheppard. “You speak less Czech than _I_ do.”

Sheppard caught the screwdriver easily, completely unfazed, and perched his butt on the edge of the console. “Ah!” Zelenka said, “McKay, you are entirely wrong again. Look, the—“

“— Of course,” McKay said, “but you’re forgetting—“

“We don’t even have to be here for this bit,” Sheppard said, until Zelenka reached out with one hand without looking up, and Sheppard rolled his eyes and put his arm into Zelenka’s hand. Zelenka mashed Sheppard’s hand down on a particular control interface.

“Make with the thing,” Zelenka said. 

Sheppard’s face went distant. “What am I lookin’ for?”

“You tell me,” Zelenka said frankly. 

Sheppard blinked, bit his lip, and suddenly there was a bass groan somewhere in the wall behind them. Lorne jumped to his feet, grabbing his ears at the high-pitched whining noise that he knew wasn’t out loud but was making the insides of his teeth itch. Sheppard grabbed at his own ears, and Lorne’s suspicions were borne out when both scientists stared at them in bemusement. 

“Make it stop,” Lorne gasped, and Sheppard slammed his hand back down on the interface, scrabbling desperately. 

The whining stopped and both of them slumped down in relief. “Wow,” Sheppard said, “I think that was definitely broken.”

“You heard something,” Zelenka said, raising his eyebrows. 

“I didn’t hear anything,” McKay said grouchily. 

“That is because your gene is fakey-fake,” Zelenka said, a little cheerfully. 

“So’s what’sisname’s!” McKay said, gesticulating at Lorne emphatically. 

“His fake gene is better than your fake gene,” Zelenka said, smug.

“Yes, yes, yes, laugh it up,” McKay said bitterly, “at least the gene therapy took for me so I have a chance at making this stuff work. You’ve got nothing!”

“Yes well,” Zelenka said, “at least I— oh! Look at this!”

Lorne looked over at Sheppard, who was slumped bonelessly over the edge of the console. He was watching McKay somewhat intently, looking increasingly perturbed as the man’s ranting alternated between insulting the other scientist and finishing his sentences in naked excitement at whatever technology they were uncovering. 

Lorne thought perhaps Sheppard was getting annoyed, finally; he was more and more intent-looking, fixed on McKay. At long last, he shoved himself up, grabbed McKay, and tousled his hair. “Stop being so fucking adorable,” he said.

McKay, unexpectedly, laughed at that, and pulled away, disarmingly amused. He was an obnoxious guy but he did have a sense of humor, underneath it all. “You guys can probably clear out,” he said. “I think we’ve activated every ATA-sensitive bit that’s in here.”

“You needed two of us,” Lorne said. 

“Well, yes,” McKay said, “because one control panel’s over there and the other’s over here. But we don’t need you now, it’s conclusively broken. We’re just going to get readings and then go to lunch. There’s real hamburger, I’m not gonna miss out on that.”

“Fair enough,” Sheppard said. “I’ll see you there.” 

Lorne followed him out the door. “You haven’t shot that guy yet,” he marveled.

“Nah,” Sheppard said. “I’m real fond of him.”

“I sort of don’t see how,” Lorne said. “He’s so obnoxious.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, waving a hand, “but he’s saved my life a bunch of times. It kinda… it makes the obnoxiousness easier to take. And anyway, most of his obnoxiousness is just surface. He’s really a pretty good dude, especially if you give him a reason to be.”

“I dunno,” Lorne said. 

“A lot of the science types are like that,” Sheppard said. 

“Not to that extent,” Lorne said. 

Sheppard shrugged. “Eh,” he said, “I _like_ him.”

 

It wasn’t until a couple of days later, after a whole lot more human lightswitch duty and a few close calls with getting killed, and that whole crazy run-in with Ford offworld and a little exposure to what the _rest_ of the scientists were like offworld, that Lorne suddenly had a suspicion. It came to him as he stood waiting for Sheppard after a staff meeting. The man was talking to McKay, and his body language was… Lorne wasn’t the most subtle guy, wasn’t exactly a detective or anything, wasn’t the most astute judge of social situations going, but he wasn’t all that bad at it either. And the way Sheppard’s shoulders tipped in, and something in the temperature of his smile, the way McKay’s shoulders came slightly out of their habitual hunch at his proximity, gave Lorne an inkling of a thought. 

He factored that in with Sheppard’s quite reasonable stance on DADT, and was still reaching his final conclusion— Lorne knew better than the stereotypes, and knew fine well you couldn’t tell by looking at someone whether they were gay or not, but he still had really, really never pictured Sheppard as the type— when Sheppard came over to him. 

“All right,” Sheppard said, “let’s— what?” Lorne blinked. “Is there something in my teeth?”

“No, no sir,” Lorne said. “It’s— I was thinking of something else.”

Sheppard jerked his head, and Lorne followed him down the hall. “What’s up?”

“I had some thoughts on the mission scheduling,” Lorne said, “like you asked me to look at, and I finished going over the paperwork from last year and have another set of questions for you. That’s all.”

Sheppard nodded thoughtfully, grimaced a little, probably about the paperwork. “And you were lookin’ at me just now like I had two heads because of something you found in the paperwork?”

The guy was too perceptive by half. “Not like you had two heads, sir,” Lorne said. “And no, not paperwork-related.” He glanced over his shoulder, but they were near Sheppard’s office now, and there was never anybody anywhere near here. “I was just thinking about our earlier conversation where I kept pestering you about Dr. McKay, and just now it struck me that maybe I should… _not ask you_ … about such things.”

Sheppard’s face went blank, then tightened a little. “What makes you say that?” he asked. 

“Nothing in particular,” Lorne said, understanding— he barely knew the guy; if he could pick up on it, then others must be able to. “Just a stray thought, an impression, body language maybe. I’ve spent a lot of time with the two of you and I’m not sure, it just struck me to not-ask.”

Sheppard chewed on his lower lip a moment, looking— oh. Distressed. It was true, then. 

“It’s not obvious or anything,” Lorne said, sorry he’d spoken up. “Really I don’t think it’d occur to anyone who didn’t spend so much time with both of you doing such annoying shit.”

Sheppard nodded tightly.  

Lorne leaned in a little. “Nobody’ll ever hear about it from me.” Sheppard’s posture didn’t relax at all. Lorne grimaced in chagrin. He really, really shouldn’t have said anything. “And if anybody asks me I’ll tell ‘em they’re crazy.”

“Don’t,” Sheppard said, looking stricken, but his expression shifted and he looked conflicted, or just maybe constipated, it was really hard to tell with him. 

“Please,” Lorne said, tilting his head, “you’ve outright said it doesn’t matter for anyone else. You’ve put your neck on the line to protect all those people. Let us do a little protecting of you. The only ones who’d care are back on Earth. You don’t think that if somehow some disgruntled asshole managed to bring this back there, we wouldn’t close ranks for you? Anybody comes looking for proof, they wouldn’t get it from anyone here.”

 

 

 

Rodney had been home for about thirty seconds when his balcony door hissed open. That was quick work; Sheppard had to have been watching a lifesigns detector or something. “Hey,” he said happily, straightening up from untying his shoes.

Sheppard’s face stopped him. The man was blank-faced, still in uniform, and looked like maybe he’d just witnessed his entire family being murdered, or maybe somebody’d crashed one of his jumpers, or something— shocked, cold, grim. “What’s wrong?” Rodney asked, alarmed. 

“Lorne knows,” Sheppard said. 

“Knows what?” Rodney asked. 

Sheppard made the usual hand-flop between the two of them that seemed to have become the universal sign for whatever the hell it was they were doing. “This,” he said. 

Rodney blinked. “How?”

“Just from watching us together,” Sheppard hissed. “He picked it up just from that. An impression, he said. Body language, he said.”

Rodney blinked again, then sat down. Sheppard couldn’t yell at him for having _body language_. It wasn’t a thing somebody could just _not have_. “I’m sorry,” he said miserably. “I didn’t think I’d… I thought I’d been pretty good.” 

There was a long silence, then Sheppard sat down next to him. “I’m not yelling at you,” he said, sounding upset but not angry. Rodney chanced a look. Sheppard looked awful, more like someone had shot his dog maybe, less like he was going to seek cold-blooded revenge and more like he was just upset. 

“It can’t have been more than a good guess,” Rodney said. “I’ve gotten a lot of practice at this, remember? I’ve discovered that to keep sleeping together a secret you have to not substantially alter your interactions with the person in question. If you have a love/hate kind of deal and you have angry sex a lot, you can pretend to hate each other and can just be really cold all the time in public and nobody will think that’s weird. But we…” He trailed off and looked over at Sheppard, who was looking even more stricken. Like maybe someone had shot his dog and was now making its fur into slippers, or something. “We don’t have that kind of relationship. We bicker, yeah, but it’s friendly. If I shut down and am cold to you people will assume we were fucking and broke up. We have to keep on like we are, stay friendly, mess with each other, undermine each other in staff meetings and bring each other lunch. It’s what we do, it’s what’s normal. And you know what, even if we weren’t fucking, there would be some people who thought we were, because that’s the way people think.”

Sheppard pushed to his feet, looking faintly sick. It was like Rodney had just presented him with the still-bloody fur slippers made from his beloved dog. This metaphor was going too far, Rodney thought, staring up into Sheppard’s face— God, he was pretty. “Yeah,” he said a little hollowly. “Look, I think— maybe we should try that.”

“Try what?” Rodney mentally rewound. “Being normal with each other? Because that’s what we’ve been doing.”

Sheppard nodded tightly. “Yes,” he said, “only for real. Like, without the fucking.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” Rodney demanded, leaping to his feet in shock. 

“There’s nothing to break off,” Sheppard said, and his face had gone shuttered, impossible to tell whether he were angry or just reflexively sarcastic. “We continue on as normal and just stop putting our dicks in each other.” He waved one hand almost dismissively. 

“Putting our dicks in each other,” Rodney said, incredulous. “That’s what this is to you?”

“That’s all it _can_ be,” Sheppard said. “Don’t you want more than that? I can’t give you more than that.”

“I want whatever I can get,” Rodney admitted, regretting it immediately— he always did that, always laid his heart right out on the lab bench like a knick-knack at a yard sale, and nobody ever took it like the precious thing it was. Laying it out like that made it look cheap and tawdry and not very appealing. But Rodney wasn’t, had never been, good at the self-presentation, at working angles or managing appearances. It wasn’t his thing. Substance should be enough. 

But it never was.

“You deserve better than that,” Sheppard said, and he was retreating, the craven bastard, allergic to emotions. God, it was the opposite of surprising that the guy was divorced. (Though, that was literally _all_ Rodney knew about his romantic history. Hm.)

“What we deserve and what we get are never the same thing,” Rodney said bitterly. “I’m just happy getting enough. You’re enough, Sheppard. Don’t take that away because you wish it was better.” 

_Oh._ Sheppard wished it was better. Sheppard couldn’t get what he needed from Rodney, either. This wasn’t… _oh_. Sheppard was shaking his head, completely inscrutable. 

“Atlantis isn’t a closed system anymore,” Sheppard said. “There are people here who didn’t come here to die. I’ve seen how some of them look at you. You don’t have to settle for what you can get, Rodney. Somebody here can give you what you deserve. Somebody here wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with you. Somebody here would give you a fair shot at something real.”

“Some of them look at me?” Rodney asked, astonished. It was completely the wrong thing to say, he knew immediately, the way he always knew immediately but never beforehand, _never_ fucking _before_ hand; something in Sheppard’s cheek twitched, and he raised his eyebrows and smiled slightly, looking down.

“Yes,” he said. “Ask that redheaded botanist out. The one with the mouth. She watched you for that whole lecture. And she laughs at all your jokes.”

“I can’t,” Rodney said. “I— Sheppard.”

“Try it,” Sheppard said. “Just— try it. And then see if you still want to settle for whatever you can get with me.”

Rodney opened and closed his mouth a couple times but while he was trying to work out how to get words to come out, Sheppard left, and the door hissed shut behind him. 

 

 

 

Elizabeth blinked, looking at the scene before her in the lunch room, then took her sandwich and bottle of water and pivoted on her heel to walk back down the hall. She was heading for her office, but coming from the back way like this she went past Sheppard’s, and noticed he was in there, behind his desk, feet kicked up, frowning at a tablet. She paused in the door. 

After a moment Sheppard’s eyes tracked slowly up to her and he raised an eyebrow. “Hey,” he said. 

“Hey,” she answered, trying to think of how to say it. “So, um…” _Your boyfriend is openly hitting on a woman in the middle of the mess hall._ It didn’t have the right ring to it. 

“Yes?” Sheppard said politely. 

“You know,” she said, “never mind,” and cast about frantically for something work-related. “I um, why are you in your office?” He never came here, almost never; half the time he did his paperwork sitting across from her desk with his feet up. He seemed really fond of having his feet up. 

He sat up, and leaned his elbow on the desk, propped his chin in his hand. “Lemme guess,” he said, “you just saw Rodney and Katie in the mess hall.” 

Elizabeth glanced both ways but the hallway was, of course, deserted. She stepped in closer and hissed, “What the hell is he doing?”

John shrugged. “She likes him. I told him to go for it,” he said. 

“But,” Elizabeth said, scandalized and stunned and hurt, and waved her hand at him. “But, you!”

John shrugged again, and he didn’t look upset or broken-up, but he did look about ten years older and tired as hell. “Me, nothing,” he said. “I’m still a member of the US military. And Rodney deserves a relationship with someone who can, you know, openly admit to him, don’t you think?”

It hurt, Elizabeth was surprised to discover. It hurt a lot, a twisting dull ache somewhere behind her ribcage. “That’s, it doesn’t— _John_.”

“I know I said Don’t Ask Don’t Tell doesn’t apply here, but that’s really the kind of rule that’s for everyone else,” he said. “I know how tenuous my political situation is. I can’t have any weaknesses like that.”

“A relationship isn’t a weakness,” Elizabeth said, but she knew that wasn’t true; relationships were the worst kind of weakness.

Sheppard smiled tightly, a small sad smile that didn’t part his lips or reach his eyes. “It wasn’t a relationship anyway,” he said. “Not what we had. It was just, you know. Sometimes, for comfort.” He shrugged again. “It’s not fair to Rodney, he’s not that kind of guy.”

“Not what kind of guy?” Elizabeth demanded. 

Sheppard shoved back from the desk and stood up, rolling his shoulders and blowing out a breath. “He’s basically never been in a relationship with anyone who wasn’t an asshole,” Sheppard said, rubbing his face. “A lot of them were kind of ashamed of him, didn’t want anyone to know they’d slept with him, that kind of shit.” He flicked his gaze up, met Elizabeth’s eyes— he looked angry, she realized. “He deserves better.”

“He dumped you over that?” Elizabeth asked. 

“No,” Sheppard said. “Nobody dumped anybody. There was never dumping. There was never anything for either of us to be dumped from.” He waved a hand, frustrated. 

“I really don’t understand,” Elizabeth said, deflating slightly. 

Sheppard gazed at her, softer, sad. “It’s all right,” he said. “I can’t be what he needs. I told him to go find what he needs.”

 


	6. Something Pretty Special

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, I fell off some stairs the other night and screwed up my ankle pretty good, so I have a little more time to sit here. Hopefully some good writing will come of it. I was sort of hoping for better painkillers, the kind that make you too high to write coherently, but no. So, here we are. Speedier updates. 
> 
> John has a series of conversations.  
> Takes place after Runner, then occurs in the in-betweens of Duet, Condemned, and Trinity, and a little after.

 

It was a lot easier than John had thought. He’d been pretty worried that he was in way too deep with Rodney, that this had snuck up and become a serious romantic relationship— and wasn’t that a wild concept, John being enough of an idiot to open himself up to that kind of nonsense again, especially with someone he couldn’t legally do any of it with— but it turned out it was really no big deal to just stop sleeping with him. Yeah, Rodney gave him those weird puppy-dog eyes sometimes, which shouldn’t have been affecting but was no matter how much John told himself it was ridiculous for a grown man to look like that— but it only took him about a week to notice the red-headed botanist John had pointed out. John hadn’t been lying. She really was interested in Rodney. Stared at his ass a lot under her lashes. John made sure not to glare at her. Didn’t say a word to her; he was no good at that shit.

And in the meantime John was bonding pretty well with the new guy, the Runner from the planet with crazy Ford. Ronon. Or, well, John thought they were bonding. Maybe? The guy was impossible to read. They ran together, sometimes, and John had really prided himself his whole life on his running ability, not sprinting exactly but over the long haul. He could just run forever, long after everybody else gave up and went back and took what scores they could. But this new guy? 

Yeah, he made John feel pretty old and slow and poorly-conditioned. And it was impossible to tell whether he thought John was adorably incompetent, or maybe was impressed that he could pretty much hang, or maybe he was pissed-off that John kept showing up. There was no way of knowing, but he was a damn good distraction.

Er, not distraction. Motivation. John lost almost ten pounds before he figured out that he had to eat a lot more to keep up with the increased exercise, but then he started putting on muscle and it was like he was twenty-five again, that year of his Iraq deployment when he’d worked out so much out of boredom that he’d outgrown all his uniforms. He looked amazing now, but the real benefit was that he slept like a rock, and spent basically no time sitting on the edge of his bed looking out at the balcony door and making himself remember the way that even in the middle of an orgasm, Rodney still hadn’t ever used John’s given name. 

He also was usually too tired to jerk off, except occasionally in the shower, and if he thought about Rodney then, well, it was only normal— he was the most recent action John had gotten, by a couple years even. That was just normal.

Sometimes he managed to think of Nancy’s breasts, her mouth, the crazy-hot little noises she’d make when he got her to have multiple orgasms. He wasn’t sure if that was more or less pathetic. He’d heard she’d remarried, less than a year after the divorce was finalized. He wasn’t mad, she deserved to be happy, but it made him feel even more like a loser.

On the bright side, John was starting to think that maybe they had enough staff now that he wasn’t going to always be getting injured. This was his longest stretch away from the infirmary in a while, and even the bad shoulder that had been nagging him ever since Rodney threw him out a window was pretty much healed up now, enough that he could really push it. 

He still couldn’t touch Teyla in hand-to-hand, and after three weeks of it he wasn’t really any closer to catching Ronon— who was putting on weight too, eating enough food for the first time in years and consequently putting on condition and sleek muscle like a thoroughbred and getting faster like one too, not that John was jealous— but he was feeling pretty amazing. 

He just wasn’t really thinking about anything. He certainly wasn’t avoiding the mess hall at lunch where Rodney kept meeting up with Katie— her name was Katie and she had a really endearing shy smile, which she deployed pretty much every time Rodney spoke, not that John was watching— it’s just that John had to eat so much to keep up with his workout-enhanced metabolism that he was forever taking his meals to go and eating at odd times. His life was work, working out, eating, sleeping, and more work. 

And he liked it fine that way. He was a Lieutenant Colonel, back on the career track, he was gonna ride this trajectory as far as he could and stay out of reach of everyone who’d ever wanted to see him fail and so fucking _there_ , Dad, _there’s_ your fuck-up, _there’s_ the little punk who was never going to amount to anything, with a fucking below-the-zone promotion and fuck you too, Anson. His personal life might be a disaster but it always had been, and at least this time he had his job to make up for it. He tackled his paperwork with a heretofore unprecedented zeal, blew through last year’s backlog with Lorne in fucking no time flat, and managed to be too busy to do human lightswitch duty pretty much ever. 

So yeah.

It sucked.

“What, um,” Lorne said, one afternoon as he sat at the other desk in John’s cramped little office. John looked up at him, blinked as his eyes refused to focus. Shit, the sun was setting, what the fuck time was it? 

“Huh?” John was feeling kinda foggy. He hadn’t eaten in at least four hours. Nowadays, that was a lot, for him. He was probably putting away upwards of four thousand calories a day, and a lot of it was raw or nearly-raw vegetables, a lot of clean protein, a lot of good fats, not a ton of processed food or junk food. But his eyes were bugging him, and he’d asked Beckett if it was a vitamin deficiency. The man had actually laughed and told him that no, it was simple eyestrain.

Oh.

John had never really had a desk job. It was a bit unnerving to realize that he did, now. 

“Um,” Lorne went on, “what do you, um, do for fun around here?”

John blinked at him. Was Lorne asking him out? They’d already been over this, Lorne wasn’t gay. Though John would’ve said the same, _had_ said the same, at the same point in _his_ tenure on Atlantis, so…

“I know you don’t do paperwork for fun,” Lorne prompted gently. “Or it wouldn’t’ve been in the state it was when we got here. What do you do when you’re not catching up on this?”

John blinked again. “Oh,” he said, catching on. No, Lorne wasn’t asking him out, he was trying to get him out of the office. Lorne thought he was working too much. The concern was touching but the implications were a little insulting. “Well, I… well, normally I spend a lot more time in the field. It’s just… you know, my team.” He looked down at his hands, fidgeted with a pencil he’d been sharpening with his ka-bar. “We’re kinda… we’re down one, and I don’t… you know how it is. I’m still holdin’ out.”

“Avoiding it, you mean,” Lorne said, and John must’ve given him a look, because he swallowed and said, “Sir.”

John scrubbed at his itchy eyes, rubbed his face. “Yeah,” he said, “pretty much.”

“Looks like you’re getting that new guy kinda groomed for the role, though,” Lorne said. 

John tilted his head. “Could be,” he said. “He’s promising. Weir’ll totally go for it.”

“Is that what this is about?” Lorne asked, waving at the room— indicating what, John couldn’t guess. “This sudden obsessive focus on paperwork. Did seeing Ford again get you all worked up?”

John looked around. “Sorta,” he said. “It’s… having control over something is kind of a novelty, I guess.” 

Lorne nodded, rubbed his face, and pushed back his chair. “Well,” he said, “I’m done here. I can’t do this anymore. Not today.”

“Fair enough,” John said. _Stop asking me questions,_ he thought but did not say. His 2IC was too smart by half. 

“Forgive my presumption,” Lorne said, “but, um— did you and McKay finally fight about something?”

“We fight all the time,” John said. It was almost back to normal. They could almost banter like they used to, without John sometimes putting his foot too deep into his mouth or Rodney giving him the kicked-puppy face. 

“Yeah but,” Lorne said, and paused, frowning. 

John shoved his chair back and stood, stretching. He’d overdone the lifting that morning, a bit, and his shoulder was aching, but it also might have been a coming weather change. He was reluctantly accepting that he was becoming one of those old guys who could tell you if it was going to rain by whether their problem body parts were aching or not. His ribs had been cracked enough times that they normally provided the counterpoint to the healed shoulder bones. They were hurting a bit too, but that also could’ve been the drubbing he’d received from Teyla the previous day.

“You said it,” John said. “Can’t do this any more today. You’re right, though, it’s forever since I’ve done something fun.”

“You and McKay used to hang out more,” Lorne said. 

Lorne really wasn’t going to be put off by indirectness. John sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “we did. We don’t now, though. I think he’s datin’ a botanist.”

Lorne looked stricken. “Wh— but why?” John thought he was managing a noncommittal expression, but he must not have been, because Lorne set his jaw and said, “I’m sorry, I guess it’s not my place to ask.”

John looked away. “It’s all right,” he said, a little gruffly. “Isolated like this, you can’t really keep up a good dividing line between professional and personal life stuff.”

There was a moment, then Lorne said, “It’s just, the way you looked at him, the way he changed when you were around— it seemed like something pretty special. Kind of thing you don’t see a lot.” He was looking down and away, too, fidgeting with the buckle of his sidearm holster’s leg strap. He glanced up at John, grimaced a little, looked back down. 

“It, it wasn’t like that,” John said a little bit weakly. “We weren’t— we’re still friends. We still hang out.”

Lorne looked up at him for a long, considering moment, then looked away again. “Yeah,” he said, and got slowly to his feet. “Well, goodnight. Mission tomorrow, anyway.”

“Yeah,” John said. They were checking up on one of the trading partners they’d established last year. Small planet, but nice enough people. Pretty primitive, but their fruit orchards were nice and had added some much-needed variety to last year’s cuisine. Fruits weren’t ripe yet, but they’d heard a rumor the planet had been culled, so Weir wanted to touch base. John figured it was a good mission for Lorne’s team; he was breaking in a new lieutenant John thought might be promising, Cadman, an explosives expert. Thinking about that was better than thinking about Rodney. “Catch you then.”

 

 

 

If John had thought it was bad watching Rodney make awkwardly sweet conversation with Katie in the mess hall (and he had, he was definitely over being in denial), it was somehow inexplicably even worse watching Rodney kiss Carson. Even if it had, as he’d insisted, been Cadman doing it. Still. There had definitely been tongue. John felt a little ill, and worse because he knew his disgust had showed and everyone probably thought he was grossed-out at the gayness. Which made him feel like a hypocrite. But oh well. His chagrin was a little tempered by Beckett’s idle gossip that Rodney’s official real date with Katie had kind of been a weird disaster. Katie had wound up with the impression, Beckett said, that Rodney had been trying to set up a threesome with her and Beckett, and had been sort of confused and definitely not on board. Beckett had done what damage control he could, but he wasn’t confident in Rodney’s abilities to pick up the necessary slack.

He stopped by Rodney’s quarters on his way down to the infirmary. Rodney was astonished to see him, which sort of hurt. Yeah, okay, he’d been a dick this past month or two. “Hungry?” John asked. If he said he was meeting Katie for lunch, then John was going to have to suck it up and volunteer blithely to come along like it was no big deal, but it was a gamble John was willing to take.

“Actually,” Rodney said, “yes.” 

“Then let’s go eat something,” John said.

 

It was almost the same as it had been before. Teyla was giving him capital L-Looks sometimes, but they hung out now as a team, and Rodney even warmed enough to Ronon to address him by name. It would be a process, getting them to respect one another, but John was, for once, feeling up to the challenge. He still sat on the edge of his bed some nights staring at the balcony door and willing it to open, but he knew it was up to him and he also knew he couldn’t be so fickle as to take that step himself. It was cowardice to wish Rodney would come and ask him, cowardice and mean-spiritedness. 

John was way too into Rodney. It was pretty obvious now, with this distance. He was way more into Rodney than Rodney was into him. Not that Rodney wasn’t into him, exactly. But Rodney had a crush on him, thought his mouth was pretty, wanted to sleep with him, and that was about as far as that went. John, though— it wasn’t panic at being found out, it was panic at realizing how bad he had it. He was past doodling hearts in notebooks and into panic attack nightmares of losing him. Not healthy, not conducive to good co-worker relations, and most importantly, ripe for disaster if anything went wrong. No, he had to keep things at a little more distance, or he’d go crazy. And he knew if Rodney asked, he’d give in immediately. So he had to make sure Rodney never knew that. 

And that meant carefully rationing the time they spent together, making sure they weren’t alone too much, making sure he didn’t have any libido going spare if they were going to hang out late at night (he started taking showers right before team dinners just to make sure, er, business was, er, handled). It meant sleeping away from the heat-seeking on missions, usually by always taking the first watch. Ronon, unexpectedly, caught on to Rodney’s sleeping habits almost immediately, and it was only on their second night out that John discovered Rodney wrapped snugly around a semi-asleep Ronon. They didn’t always get along when awake, but Ronon was quite clearly a fan of shared body heat when sleeping. 

Good; it meant he could safely curl up on his own and not wake up blissful and horny and completely inappropriately turned-on. 

God, he missed being the little spoon. 

But no. John Sheppard was a man who slept alone. 

It sucked. 

 

 

 

And then Rodney blew up five-sixths of a solar system, and nearly killed himself and John in the process. 

John wasn’t all that mad at Rodney. Sure, he was pretty upset in the moment, and yeah, it was gonna take him a little while to forgive Rodney, and even longer for him to let Rodney forget it. (At least twice as long as Rodney had given him shit about the bug on his neck, which, well, he still was, so John figured he’d be needling Rodney about this indefinitely.) Simple reason dictated he had to let Rodney stew in what he’d done until he was properly contrite. He was pretty sure the failure itself was enough punishment for Rodney, but that didn’t mean John didn’t need time to lick his own wounds. He was pretty pissed. Rodney’d played him pretty handily. 

But then Weir called John in, and boy, he’d been through some ass-chewings in his life, but this one was bound to be serious. 

“Have a seat, Colonel Sheppard,” she said, a little coldly. He’d overheard most of her dressing-down of Rodney, which had been conducted in high dudgeon at maximum volume pretty much immediately, but that had been yesterday. She hadn’t called him in until late afternoon today, and it had been an oddly formal radio hail. 

“Yes, ma’am,” John said, giving her a little bit of eyebrow attitude. She knew him, she knew he wouldn’t react too well to the classic formal schtick. Was she just trying to provoke him into something?

“I want you to convince me that your judgement isn’t impaired when it comes to trusting Rodney McKay,” she said, all cool aggression. John raised both eyebrows, at that. “This marks at least the second occasion when you and Rodney have agreed on something against my better judgement, and it has gone poorly. In a previous case, it cost the lives of two scientists. In this case, it nearly cost both of your lives. Tell me why I should leave you two together and give you a third chance.”

Capital. Rodney didn’t understand about political capital. He hadn’t understood what he was asking John for when he asked for his trust, but here it was: this was the bottom line on the bill, and John had to sign. He collected himself; it wasn’t like he hadn’t done this before. 

“Because it wouldn’t _be_ a third chance,” John said. “It would be more like a hundredth chance. Yes, two have gone poorly, but about ninety-seven others have gone well. You wanna split us up, that’s your prerogative, but you’d be splitting up the team with the best success rate of any on this mission. Why do you think I made the personal decision I did? It wasn’t easy for me to distance myself from Rodney personally like I have. But I thought it wasn’t conducive to a good team dynamic and I figured our professional record was more important than my personal happiness.”

Elizabeth stared at him. She hadn’t seen this side of him before. She should’ve known better; he knew she’d looked him up and confirmed he was one of _those_ Sheppards. She knew what he’d come from. She couldn’t have truly believed he didn’t know how to play this game. 

John stood up. “I’m not here to convince you of anything,” he said. “My record, our record, speaks for itself. And I know you know that, or you wouldn’t have put yourself out for me back on Earth. If you didn’t think I could handle this, up to and including Rodney McKay, you wouldn’t have involved the President. And I’d be dead by now, in some desert somewhere back on Earth.”

The corner of Elizabeth’s mouth twitched upward. “I see,” she said, noncommittal. 

“I know you wanted me for a pet,” he said. “I know you wanted to make sure you kept control over the military, and saw me as the best way. But I also know you know who I am. You know what I’m capable of. And you know I know every game, as well as you do.”

“Our mothers were related,” Elizabeth said calmly. 

“Distantly,” John answered. He remembered the Weirs, dimly, only because he and his brother had snickeringly called them the Weirds, even though they were anything but. At the elite level, most families were somehow interconnected. The Weirs were at the distance of cousinhood where you air-kissed on the rare occasions your paths crossed. “I figured it out the first year. But you didn’t know who I was until we went back to Earth.”

“No,” she said, “I had no chance to look you up until then.”

John leaned on the edge of the desk, and she was too well-disciplined to look, but he saw her think about it. “Rodney’s got me confused with someone else’s life story,” he said. “He asked me the other day what it was like to grow up poor. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. He thinks I come from Midwestern white trash.”

“Wow,” Elizabeth said. “Did you correct him?”

“Nah,” John said. “You’re the only person here who has any idea. I worked pretty hard to leave the family behind.” He tilted his head at her. “I never wanted to play those kinds of games. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how.”

“So you’re staying on the Rodney McKay train,” Elizabeth said. 

“I’m saying I still think Rodney’s our single best chance of surviving this mission,” John said. “And with one real serious mistake under his belt, he’s that much less likely to make another. I’m certainly not going to trust him again just because he asks. But I also would stake a fair bit on him knowing that he’d better _not_ ask unless he can back it up with something better than because-he-says-so.”

“You think he’ll learn a lesson from this,” Elizabeth said. “He didn’t sound all that contrite when I spoke to him.”

“He was defensive, with you,” John said. “With me, he was a lot more beat-down. Believe me, he’s contrite.”

Elizabeth regarded him narrowly. “Here’s the part where I have to decide whether to take _your_ word for it,” she said. 

“Oh,” John said, “you don’t have to. The record speaks for itself. Have someone crunch the numbers for you.” He eased off the desk, straightening to almost parade rest. “Was there anything else you needed?”

“You’re almost flippant about this,” Elizabeth said, eyes narrowed again.

“If you think this is me being flippant,” John said, smiling tightly, “you haven’t been paying attention.”

Unexpectedly, Elizabeth stood up. “Colonel Sheppard,” she said, and her voice was quiet. “I can’t afford to lose either of the two of you, and I just don’t believe you understand that.”

John watched her for a moment. It was a manipulation, but part of what made her such a brilliant negotiator was that she was utterly sincere in these things. “I’m expendable and you know it,” he said. “They’d replace me with Caldwell and you’d have more trouble with him, sure; I don’t think he’d be able to do for you what I do, sure; but the mission most likely still wouldn’t fail. You’d just have to work a lot harder. Rodney, though— you can’t replace him. Or Zelenka.” He considered it. “Maybe Zelenka, if you still had Rodney. But not vice-versa.”

“You’re not expendable,” Elizabeth said, and there was sternness in her face, but also a trace of fear. John couldn’t parse what the fear was about— either him understanding too much, or not. 

John gave her a half-smile. “I like to think I’m not, but I’m not as stupid as I look. I’d be a costly loss, and you’ve sunk a lot into me. But if I died a martyr you might even be able to recoup your investment.” He shrugged. “You’d do all right.”

“Sheppard,” Elizabeth said, incredulous.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s your job. It’s what you are. And it’s the reason I’m here, and alive. Can I go now? I’m starving.”

 


	7. Bare Wires

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Then John turns into a bug.
> 
> Warning: semi-graphic descriptions of torture.

 

The team sat vigil for hours at Sheppard’s bedside after the anti-retrovirus treatment. Beckett crashed after an hour, but only went as far as the curtained-off room at the other end of the hall to do so. Rodney sat hunched in a chair, staring blankly at his tablet, until Teyla put her hand on his back, between his shoulder blades. 

“Rodney,” she said, “you will hurt your back.”

He took a deep breath, realizing he hadn’t in some time, and sat up. “Right,” he said. “Thanks.” 

“How long until he’s better?” Ronon asked. 

“I could not guess,” Teyla said. Both of them looked at Rodney.

“I don’t know anything about this stuff,” Rodney said, a little defensive. He relented, though, as Teyla and Ronon both looked distressed enough that even he could pick up on it. “I’m guessing a couple of weeks. It’s just a guess, though.”

“How long til we can talk to him?” Ronon asked. 

Rodney frowned thoughtfully. “A few days, I’d bet,” he said. “Why, what do you need to tell him that you couldn’t, before?”

Ronon shrugged, uncomfortable. “He might be mad that I shot him twice,” he said. 

“I hope he does not remember all of this,” Teyla said unhappily. 

“Are you ok?” Ronon asked her. “You seemed pretty shook up.”

Teyla shook her head. “It is nothing,” she said. “He made me uncomfortable, before we realized that something was wrong. I hope he does not remember.”

“Uncomfortable,” Rodney said, frowning. 

She shook her head. “He was not himself,” she said. “He acted in a manner to which I am most unaccustomed, coming from him.”

Ronon grunted, as though she’d said something more revealing than that. Rodney looked from one of them to the other, took in the odd way Teyla’s arms were crossed, tight across her chest, shoulders hunched a little, and blurted out in sudden realization, “Oh God, he hit on you.”

“Not exactly,” Teyla said, but looked away. 

Ronon reached over and touched her arm, wrapping his fingers briefly around her bicep. She seemed to take it as reassurance, and leaned into it. “I know now that he was not himself,” she said, “and he offered me no substantial offense, it just rattled me badly.”

Rodney curled miserably into himself, immediately failing at not starting to worry what it meant that Sheppard’s response to adversity had been to dump Rodney, and his response to turning into a creepy bug creature was to start making out with Teyla. Ronon shifted and was sitting closer, with his arm around Teyla’s shoulders, and she was easily accepting the comfort. There wasn’t, Rodney reflected a little bleakly, any comfort for him. 

“Rodney,” Teyla said consideringly after a long, weary silence. “What happened between you and John?”

Rodney jerked back upright. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. 

“You both seemed so happy,” she said. “And I was not aware of any quarrel between you, but then John seemed very focused and angry, and no longer seemed to take the same joy in, well… anything. Did you have a falling-out?”

“We, ah,” Rodney said, fumbling for something to say. He couldn’t think of anything, so he slumped miserably and said, “No.”

“Then what happened?” Teyla asked. 

Rodney shook his head, at a loss, and sighed. “He sort of freaked out,” he said. “I think he felt like we were getting too close. I don’t really know. For a while he was just avoiding me. Then he was sort of speaking to me. Then I wrecked his reputation by blowing up a solar system and he wasn’t speaking to me again. Now, I’ve no idea. He’s not speaking to anybody so I guess I can’t take that personally.”

Teyla shook her head sadly. “He is very reticent about his personal life,” she said, “but it seems to me that he must have been quite badly hurt by someone in his past. Does it not seem that way to you?”

“He’s been kicked around his whole life,” Rodney said. “So has everybody. I don’t know what his problem is.”

“At any rate, I am sorry he seems to be taking it out on you,” Teyla said. 

Rodney shrugged. “I’m sort of used to it,” he said uncomfortably. 

“At least he will be returned to us,” Teyla said, closer to her normal serenity. “As long as there is life, there is time to clear up misunderstandings. That is a gift that cannot be overvalued.”

“Fair enough,” Ronon said. “Wait, were you guys together-together? Or what?”

“Or what,” Rodney said miserably. 

“You know,” Ronon said, frowning. 

“Yes, I do know,” Rodney said. “That was my answer.”

“Oh, Rodney,” Teyla said, her voice soft and sad. She stood, gracefully disentangling herself from Ronon, and embraced him where he sat, pulling his head soothingly into her solidly-muscled abdomen. “And you would like it to be more?”

“I don’t even know,” Rodney said pitifully, glad his face was muffled. Though he felt perhaps, this once, he had a little bit of a pass on being thought pathetic by Ronon. “I don’t understand him. And just when I think I’ve puzzled him out he changes all the rules.”

Teyla ruffled his hair and held him a little while longer. He would’ve pulled away self-consciously, but he caught on that it was partly for her own comfort, as well. So he stayed, breathing her familiar scent of leather and wool and incense, until she finally pulled away and sat back down. But she pulled her chair closer and took his hand, and they sat like that for a while. 

 

 

 

They had wrapped the bare wires around his fingers, his arms strapped to a sturdy table, his legs tied to the legs of the heavy wooden chair. He was naked, dripping with sweat and the bucket of foul-smelling water they’d upended over him, and his eyes were both nearly swollen shut from the beatings. He was a mess of bruises, cuts, lacerations, abrasions, from the various beatings, from being dragged, from being thrown, and from the crash that had landed him here in the first place. His ankle was almost definitely broken. 

The other ends of the wires, they clamped on to the car battery for several seconds at a time, brief eternities; each time he came back afterward, twitching and convulsing and hoarse from involuntary screaming, heart tripping frantically, every muscle seized and wrung out. The other guys were kneeling along the far wall, arms tied behind their backs, watching, and sometimes John thought that was the worst thing. But most of the time he just thought the electricity was the worst thing. And objectively he knew that the helplessness was the worst thing. 

He knew too much of this would stop his heart, would overwhelm it with conflicting electrical signals and send it into a fatal malfunction. He knew that too much could be any one of these times. And he knew they didn’t care if they killed him; him dying would only serve to break the others. He didn’t know how many times they’d done it, didn’t know how long it had been, but his heart was stuttering, tripping, fluttering, like an unbalanced engine, and he let his head loll and panted tightly, futilely. He’d been all saucy comebacks and witty one-liners beforehand, and after the first couple shocks, but by now he had bitten the inside of his mouth all to hell and couldn’t remember how to make words, couldn’t command the breath for them anyway. All he could taste was blood, his vision was grainy, his body tripping on the brink of failure, his entire world narrowed down to complete terror. 

They unwrapped the wires from the fingers of his right hand, but only to set to work pulling out his fingernails one at a time. He had no voice left to scream, really, but he did his best, screaming and screaming, trying with his wrung-out broken rubberband of a body to struggle and thrash against the restraints. 

They were ostensibly interrogating him, and had been shouting at him the whole time, demanding to know why he was here, what his orders were, where the landing sites were, who their informants were, interspersed with random abuse and blows. They wrapped wires back around the bloodied ends of his fingers and he started screaming this time even before they clamped the battery on; that heart attack was coming on now and was gonna hit him like a freight train. 

He’d told them his name, his rank, his serial number, and they’d taunted him by name, throughout most of this, and as he came out of the searing shock this time they were saying his name less mockingly and more urgently, and they had his rank wrong. “Colonel Sheppard,” an incongruously-accented voice was saying, “Colonel Sheppard, please, it’s all right, you’re safe.”

He blinked up at Dr. Beckett’s face and twitched in surprise, but he was still tied down, his fingers still felt burned, his heart was still tripping from the electric shocks. “Get me out,” he croaked hoarsely, “get the wires off me, I can’t take another one.” 

“Colonel,” Beckett said, “you’re just restrained to keep you safe, it’s all right.”

“No,” John said, the panic coming up and beating at him off-rhythm from his shuddering heart. “No, get me out, they’ll come back!” 

“Colonel, you have to calm down,” Beckett said, and John wrenched uselessly at the restraints, his wrists and his ankles and there was even a strap around his chest to hold him down. If his electricity-induced convulsions hadn’t loosened the restraints, his feeble attempts now wouldn’t, but the panic was driving him and he struggled, tasting blood, feeling the already-damaged skin at his wrists and ankles tearing anew. 

“Help me,” he pleaded, “Jesus fucking Christ, I didn’t tell ‘em anything, I swear to God, please—“ 

“Colonel,” Beckett said, “calm down, it’s not real. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not real. You’re in the infirmary, and we’ve tied you down so you don’t fall out of bed. Nobody is coming to hurt you.” He turned and spoke over his shoulder, urgently, to someone, maybe a nurse. John struggled in terror, unable to keep from whimpering— he’d told them to bring something, they were in on it, he wasn’t going to make it out of this. 

“Beckett,” another voice said, piercingly familiar, “what’s happening? What’s he talking about?”

“Stay back, Rodney,” Beckett said, “he’s not lucid and we’ve got to put him back under.”

“Wait,” and the voice was closer, and something touched his hand that wasn’t electrical current. “Sheppard? John?”

“Help me,” John said, and the person’s face was in his field of vision, he couldn’t see properly but he could see enough to recognize the face, and he stopped struggling for a moment in shock. “Rodney? Rodney, help me, get the wires off me!”

Rodney looked stricken for a moment, looked like John’s hazy memory of the man who’d found him there, still tied to the table, still wired up, and the man had tried to cover it up with a joke, “Did they try to barbeque you, boy?” but had still been badly rattled by the sight of him. 

Wait. That had happened. He’d been rescued. 

Had he?

“It’s all right, John,” Rodney said quietly, closer to him, touching his fingers, “they took the wires off already, you’re safe here.”

“I’m still tied up,” John said, piteously confused. Rodney bent close, touched his face, grimacing a little, probably at how bruised and swollen John knew he was. They’d beaten the shit out of him.

“They’re just medical restraints,” Rodney said. “You’ve been really confused, and they didn’t want you hurting yourself or anybody else trying to get away. It’s all right, Sheppard, it’s us. Your friends. We won’t hurt you. We’ll untie you in a minute, we just have to make sure you’re safe.”

“Please,” John panted, “please, take ‘em off.”

Rodney spread his hand out flat across John’s forehead, gently holding his head still. “Lie still,” he said. “Be calm. It’ll just be a moment.” He looked up, eyes flickering sharply, and John looked, following the direction of his gaze. Beckett. “Don’t sedate him again, I think he just needs a minute.”

“He’s injured himself trying to get free,” Beckett said. “His strength is still abnormal.”

“But he’s himself,” Rodney said. “He knows me.”

“Rodney,” John said, the panic coming back up, “Rodney, help!”

“I am,” Rodney said to him. “I _am_ helping. You’re all right. I won’t let anybody else hurt you. Lie still, Sheppard.” He slid his hand around to John’s cheek, cradling it. John’s face was oddly numb and stiff, probably from the bruising, and he closed his eyes, breathing through the panic as best he could. 

“Okay,” he said, “okay,” and his heart was still tripping off-kilter, too fast and uneven. “I didn’t tell ‘em anything, Rodney. I didn’t tell ‘em anything they could use.”

“I knew you wouldn’t,” Rodney said. “God, Sheppard, you never do.” He sounded a little choked-up. 

“Och,” Beckett said, “he’s torn his IV line out. Keep him still, would you? Colonel Sheppard, I need you to stay still while I get this line started again.”

John shivered violently, and blew out through gritted teeth, trying with everything he had to stay still, not to panic, not to thrash around. Rodney’s hand was still on his face and he leaned into it, closing his eyes, trying to stop shaking. “Please,” he whispered. “Please let me go.”

“You need to stay here with us,” Beckett said, distracted; something stung, an IV starting in his elbow, and John gritted his teeth trying not to flinch. “We’ll have you right as rain in no time.”

John couldn't keep his eyes shut; they flew open so he could watch Beckett warily. “Did— was Thompson okay?”

“Son, I don’t know who Thompson is,” Beckett said. “You’re in the infirmary and you’re safe.”

“Thompson made it out fine,” Rodney said quietly. “He was pretty rattled but they didn’t really cause him any lasting damage.”

John looked consideringly at Rodney, who looked subdued and sad and a little grim. “You’re not just saying that,” he said. 

“No,” Rodney said, “I read the report, it’s the truth. But you’ve lost a little time, Sheppard; that happened a long time ago, before you came to Atlantis. What’s the last thing you remember? Think, now.”

John blinked. “Atlantis,” he said. Right. Atlantis. He was in another galaxy. But… His thought processes were fuzzy, and he looked over in sudden alarm at Beckett, who had been carefully fitting something to a shunt in the IV line. “What’s in that?” he asked sharply.

“Och, it’s nothing, son,” Beckett said. “Saline, the anti-retrovirus treatment, and a mild sedative to keep your heart rate down.”

“No sedatives,” John said in alarm, “please, no,” but it was too late, and he was sliding off. “God damn it,” he said, blinking heavily, and then he was skating off into oblivion.

 

 

 

“Why’d you do that?” Rodney asked, annoyed. Sheppard’s eyes rolled and the expression of faint alarm wrinkling his mostly-unaffected eyebrows smoothed out into stupid blankness. “I thought we were trying to let him regain consciousness so the drugs didn’t build up too much.”

“Rodney,” Beckett said, “he was raving. He’s obviously not lucid. Spending a bit more time sedated will let the gene therapy do its work without him causing more damage to himself or others.”

“He wasn’t raving,” Rodney said. 

“It was kind of you to play along,” Beckett said, “but I don’t generally find entertaining delusions to be all that helpful in these cases.”

“It wasn’t a delusion,” Rodney said. “He was referring to real events that happened to him several years ago.”

“Wires on his fingers?” Beckett asked, pausing to look up for the first time.

“Yes,” Rodney said grimly. “They wrapped bare wires around his fingertips, then connected the other ends to a car battery.”

“Who did this?” Beckett demanded, astonished. 

“Taliban, or their allies,” Rodney said. “In 2002, I think. He was in the hands of the enemy for about 36 hours and they interrogated him under torture. Thompson was a 19-year-old Army private whose interrogation he interrupted. I can only suppose that the sedation Sheppard was under just now confused him and he thought he was back there.”

“I see,” Beckett said, looking horrified. 

“So, he generally doesn’t do incredibly well in restraints,” Rodney said. “And I don’t think his panicked reactions were all that surprising, if he thought he was back there. I know you know about his PTSD.”

“Everyone on this expedition has PTSD,” Beckett said wearily, “and I need him to stay restrained.” He pointed at his own black eye from Sheppard’s first foray into consciousness, during which he had proven that he was not in any way lucid. That had been nearly two days ago. He hadn’t spoken intelligibly then, had only thrashed in obvious pure reflex. He’d been in restraints since then, but sedated to unconsciousness or nearly-so. 

“My point was,” Rodney said, “he wasn’t raving, he just had lost a couple of years and thought he was somewhere else. But somewhere real.”

Beckett nodded. “Well, then,” he said, “that’s hopeful. Perhaps we’ll try again, when this dose wears off, and let him wake up.” He glanced at his watch, and made a note on the tablet on the table nearby, then took the tablet and walked off to his office. 

Rodney stood a moment longer, looking down at Sheppard. He was still creepy and alien-looking, the bluish coloring under his skin still snaking out in lines from where it had begun to change his skin to a carapace, but it had begun to disperse and fade like bruising under his skin. His mouth in particular had begun to recover, the weird striations in his lips faded until now it mostly just looked like he’d been punched a few times. 

His eyes were still bizarre, though, with the vertical pupils. Rodney had sort of hoped those would go first. They were creepy. But above all of it, his hair remained utterly unchanged, magnificently untamed, completely familiar. 

Rodney looked around. Nobody was nearby. So he let himself take a moment and put his hand in Sheppard’s hair. “I miss you,” he said quietly. 

 

 

 


	8. Scent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John learns that you just can't get by without some things. Or, well, can't turn back into a human after having been a bug without a little help.

 

 

Rodney was starting to get used to John waking up screaming, but it didn’t break his heart any less. “Please,” John was sobbing, “please, please, please let me go.”

Rodney left the room and went to Carson’s office. Beckett looked up from his computer and smiled. “How’s our patient?” he asked brightly.

“He’s begging for me to untie him,” Rodney said. “Despite waking up in a panic every time, he hasn’t tried to hurt anyone in almost a week. Is it really necessary to keep him tied down every hour of every day, except when he’s unconscious?”

Beckett made a face. “Rodney, he’s still not Colonel Sheppard,” he said. 

“But he is, Carson,” Rodney said. “And he’s having flashbacks to being a POW. What kind of damage is that doing to him psychologically?”

“I’m more worried about the physical damage he could do to himself and those around him,” Beckett said. 

“C’mon,” Rodney said. “Put him in the isolation room. Make sure there are no knives or guns in there. Bingo.”

Beckett gave Rodney a long, considering look. “I’m still concerned he might do himself an injury,” he said. “Scratching or picking, for example. I know his skin itches, he rubs it on the blankets.” 

“Monitor him,” Rodney said. “Watch him. I don’t care. I’ll go in there and keep watch. I can work from in there. I don’t care. I just can’t listen to him like this, can’t watch him suffer. He’s fucking terrified, Beckett, and it’s breaking my fucking heart.”

 

 

 

The isolation room was much better, but that really wasn't saying much. The lights were bright, and people stared at him, some of whom he could see, and some of whom he knew were watching through the mirrored glass. He enjoyed the novelty of being able to use the toilet on his own, but there was only so much to that— there was no door, and he knew someone was watching him, and there were cameras everywhere, and he knew it was being recorded, and he was lucid enough now to know that the recordings would make their way back to the IOA at some point. Doubtless, edited; it was unlikely an international committee would really care to watch him take a piss— but he could see the little glass bubbles of the cameras, and it itched. 

All of him itched, actually; his skin was constantly crawling. His bandaged fingers didn’t allow for much scratching; the numbness had worn off and now it was painful where his fingernails were missing, leaving exposed nail beds that still sluggishly leaked blood if he disturbed the bandages. He’d have scars, but that wasn’t really anything new for him. 

He still had instincts he didn’t understand, but they were all in turmoil now, under his old mind, his human mind. He’d fumbled himself mostly into lucidity, except that he was terrified to sleep, and still didn’t trust himself, and his arms were still blue and scaly, and while his legs mostly looked normal, his chest was still scaly and there were ridges and things in his skin in strange places, and his hands, even sans claws, didn’t move normally yet. 

Abruptly stillness was too much for him, and he dived off the awful hospital bed and scrambled into a corner. The cameras watched him imperturbably, even though it was the middle of the night; there were still lights on, and he knew there were people watching somewhere. It was too bright in here, too sterile, too open, too cold. And if he closed his eyes, the nightmares would come. Every single time he’d awoken since the transformation, he’d been screaming in the throes of some nightmare memory or other. 

He paced around the room, made a single abortive effort to climb the wall before he remembered he had no claws anymore and couldn’t. He pulled the blanket from the bed and hunched in the corner, wrapping himself in it, but almost immediately he knew it wasn’t enough. 

They’d given him several spare blankets, folded neatly and stacked in the rack under the bed. He pulled them out, then tipped the bed over, shoved it into the corner, pulled the mattress off, and shoved the blankets in, building himself a little cave before he even had time to properly process what his instincts were asking.  

At last he came back to himself enough to relax, curled into the corner, the bedframe on one side and the mattress like a roof, the blankets puddled into a nest and one wadded in the entryway to close it off. It was dark, and close, and warm in here, and he panted as the panic he hadn’t even really acknowledged faded away a little bit and left him exhausted. 

No sleep, he thought; don’t sleep, you can’t, you mustn’t. His hands ached and he fidgeted repentantly with a torn bandage, turning bloody; he’d worked a little too frantically on building this den. But the topmost blanket had a waffle weave to it, and as he moved around, he discovered that he could rub his back slowly against it and get some measure of relief from the itching. 

He lay there a little while, rolling slowly and steadily against the blanket, damaged hands tucked in to his chest. It felt good. It was dark, and warm, and the pain was less here. His skin was crawling less. Blessed, blessed relief; it was the first time he hadn’t been completely terrified in days, maybe weeks. 

Slowly he slid, reluctantly, toward sleep. He had to sleep; he hadn’t in about thirty hours. 

 

He’d probably been asleep about an hour when they burst in and hauled him out. He woke disoriented and terrified, took a swing at an orderly in panic before he even remembered what planet he was on, and before he knew what was going on he was tied down and there was a needle biting sharply into his arm. 

“No,” he cried, “wait,” and something gave in his throat and he tasted blood, and as the cold sickening rush took him he cried out, his voice nearly human again. 

 

The bird was damaged, the turbines screaming too high, the whole thing shaking like it was going to fall apart, and John gritted his teeth and hung on grimly, trying to keep it pointed straight, keep it flying level enough, keep the altitude high enough. He was losing blood, getting weaker by the moment, and his copilot was dead; there were injured men in the back, the medics frantic, the radio cutting in and out, and there was nowhere he could set it down, nowhere safe. 

John knew it wasn’t real. There was no way it was real. It had happened, but not like this: his father was sitting in the copilot’s seat, giving him one of his lectures on personal responsibility, and that had definitely happened too but that particular lecture had happened when John was about thirteen and had ended with his father losing his temper and throwing John up the stairs. He’d hit the bannister facefirst and gotten a bloody nose and hidden in his room all night trying to cry quietly enough that no-one would hear, soaking through one of his t-shirts with blood and terrifying himself that he’d die before the bleeding finally stopped. 

The next morning when he’d crept out after he knew his father would be gone to work, every one of the model airplanes he and his mother had built through his whole childhood had been gone from the little display case in the den, and the housekeeper had been waiting with a sad expression and a cardboard box to come get the rest from his room. His father said he’d lost his right to have those planes when he’d talked back, and indeed John never saw them again. His mother had been dead a month; most of the planes had been built in those last few months when she was too sick to go riding with John anymore. Just the two of them, and they’d been his most treasured possessions.

Now John’s father was methodically and calmly dismantling the damaged helicopter as John tried to fly it to safety with blood streaming out of his nose and out of the rents in his flight suit. John pleaded with him; if he didn’t keep flying they’d die here, the injured men in the back would die if he didn’t get them to safety. But his father didn’t listen. Shoulders set grimly, face expressionless, he wrenched pieces out of the cockpit and put them into the cardboard box. “This is what happens,” he kept saying coldly. “This is what happens when you can’t be responsible. You lose things. Things get taken from you.” And he would not look at John, wouldn’t listen, no matter what John said.

John resorted to sobbing and pleading; this wasn’t defiance, this was life and death, there was no time for these kinds of power struggles when lives were on the line. Innocent lives— people who had no stake in the political struggle, nothing to gain either way, no say into the decisions, were bleeding out and terrified and helpless, and John threw his hard-won pride away and abjectly begged his father to stop, please stop.

 

 

 

“—Ridiculous,” McKay’s voice was saying. “He wasn’t hurting anyone in there. I watched the footage myself. He was just trying to find a little scrap of comfort.”

“You’re forgetting just how dangerous he is,” Beckett said, “to himself as well as to the rest of us.”

“Come on,” Rodney said, and his voice was close now. 

“Rodney,” John sobbed brokenly, “Rodney, help.”

“You’ve got to calm down, Colonel,” Beckett said. “You broke a man’s nose last night. Rodney says you’re lucid but if you’re still hurting people—“

“He broke someone’s nose who yanked him out of a sound sleep,” Rodney said. “The old Colonel Sheppard would’ve done the same. Hell, I’d’ve done the same, and I’m not a particularly co-ordinated person when I first awaken. I daresay even you’d do the same, if you were just trying to get some sleep.”

“He’s ripped up his hands again, he’s damaged his vocal cords, he’s torn his stitches and scratched himself up,” Beckett said. “We’re going to have to up the dosage of sedatives to keep him under, so there’ll be something left by the time the reverse-engineered retrovirus has had a chance to bring him back!”

“Carson,” Rodney said. “Look. I’ll take responsibility for him. Me and Teyla, we’ll switch off. We can keep him under supervision. And we can keep him calm. I know we can do this.”

“He isn’t the Colonel,” Beckett warned. 

John pushed himself up to his elbows. “Rodney,” he said, whispering hoarsely. “Rodney yes. Yes Rodney.”

Beckett turned to look at him. Christ, the man looked horrible; exhausted, bruised, frazzled. “Colonel Sheppard,” he said, frowning. 

“Yes, Carson,” John said, as sweetly as he could manage, “Carson, please. Please let me go. Please let me go with Rodney.”

It was all he had in him, and he knew his face was still stiff and inexpressive. Carson considered him for a long moment. 

“Not yet, Rodney,” Carson said. “But we’ll give the isolation chamber another go. You go in there with him, arrange it the way you think will benefit him most, and we’ll see how that goes today.”

“Fine,” Rodney said. 

 

The infirmary orderlies were Marines, of course. Two of them walked John, in padded handcuffs, back to the isolation room. He couldn’t stop twitching all over with nervousness— who was he kidding, outright fear— but at least his fear was starting to feel human again. His skin crawled and he limped in his bandaged feet, but he had a scrub shirt now, and his raw wrists were bandaged. 

They escorted him through the door and he stopped, startled; the isolation room was dark, now, lit in only a few places by focused beams of light. And the bed was a pallet in the corner, with a makeshift roof of a lightweight blanket, and the controls of an electric blanket spilling out of it. 

Rodney was sitting on the floor, looking comfortable in a little nest of pillows a few feet away from the bed. He was, of course, typing away on a laptop. “There you are,” he said. He frowned at the Marines. “You can probably take the shackles off, fellows.”

John kept his head down as they took them off, but as soon as they stepped away he shook himself all over and turned to put his back to the wall, watching them. They filed out, shut the door, and John automatically sought out and mentally marked each camera that was watching him. 

Only then did he turn to Rodney. He dropped to a crouch, surprising even himself that it was so comfortable, and crawled slowly over, as unthreateningly as he could manage. Rodney looked nervous, so John dropped to a sitting position about two feet away from Rodney’s bent leg, and slowly, carefully reached over to pat his thigh, hand open. “Rodney,” he said. He wanted to say more words but it hurt to talk. 

Rodney smiled. “John,” he said. “I thought you might like it a little darker and warmer. And I understand why they didn’t like you hiding from the cameras, but if I’m in here directly observing, I can reassure them that you’re not, I don’t know, building a bomb or something in there. So I made you a den. It’s not as great as the one you made, but I thought it might serve, and it was a compromise with Carson anyway.”

John nodded, and rubbed his face. His face felt so strange, stiff in places and chitinous and bumpy. He rubbed at it some more, carefully. “Don’t pick,” Rodney said, concerned. 

Guiltily, John dropped his hands to his lap. He grimaced as well as he could, feeling the skin under the— scales?— stretching. He tried a few other facial expressions, and came back to himself with a start when Rodney suddenly laughed. 

“You look ridiculous, Colonel,” Rodney said. 

John ducked his head. He was well aware he looked far worse than ridiculous. He was kind of a vain guy; he sort of tried not to be, but he knew he was a pretty motherfucker, it had gotten him both into and out of a lot of scrapes. Well, not anymore. He scrubbed at the back of his head, then dropped his hands to his lap and repentantly smoothed at the bandages on his fingers. 

“I just meant,” Rodney said, gentler, “the faces you’re making are silly. You look fine, and in a couple of weeks, Carson said, all the weird blue stuff will be gone and you’ll be back to your old pretty self.”

John hunched his shoulders and looked at his hands. After a moment, Rodney poked his leg, and John looked up. Rodney had a pad of paper and a pen in his hands. “Could you write? I know speaking’s difficult, and you really shouldn’t, you’ll damage yourself. But could you communicate that way?”

John took the pen, fumbled it, and struggled to pick it up, gritting his teeth. Rodney picked it up and handed it to him, and he took the pad of paper and stared at it for a long moment. It was hard to hold the pen with his bandaged fingers, and he realized that the tendons in his hands were still oddly deformed. He could still grip with his thumb, but his first and second fingers didn’t want to move independently. He couldn’t get the pen to sit the way it normally would for him to write. 

“I guess not,” Rodney said finally. “Well, we’ll revisit that in a while. And I guess typing’s out. Maybe a full-sized keyboard and a stylus, but it’d be awfully laborious for you to hunt-and-peck with one stick. We’ll save that for emergencies. How about I make you a multiple-choice test for a couple of crucial things?”

John squinted at him, blinked, and finally let his shoulders down. He sighed deeply, and nodded. “Why don’t you give sleep a try?” Rodney asked, pointing at the den. 

John twitched toward it, tempted, but he knew the nightmares waited. He bit his lip, which was unexpectedly difficult and not nearly as soothing as it usually was. Sleep. He was exhausted. He would be warm in there, and safe, and he could curl up, finally, and scratch some of his itches— but he knew the horrors that lurked, waiting for him to be unconscious and defenseless, and he trembled miserably as he contemplated it. 

Rodney’s hand was gentle and warm on his arm. “John,” he murmured, “you’re shaking. Is it cold?”

John shook his head, curling in on himself. His mind was working strangely, partly exhaustion and the residue of drugs, partly terror, and partly the warring impulses of instincts, his own and the alien ones that had come with the genetic changes. His instincts told him Rodney equalled safety, and he didn’t know if those were his own or the alien’s. 

He scrambled to the nest, pulled out the electric blanket, and brought it back to Rodney, tugging carefully so it wouldn’t come unplugged. Rodney watched him in bemusement. John wrapped himself in the blanket, which was on and deliciously warm, then curled himself into a ball, partly on Rodney’s pillows, with his head resting in Rodney’s lap. “Safe,” he murmured, and as Rodney’s hand immediately settled into his hair, he sighed and stopped shaking. 

Rodney petted his hair for a long while. “You’re okay here, John,” he murmured. “I won’t let ‘em get you.” 

Sleep swallowed John up unexpectedly. 

 

 

 

The weird instincts were gone, the last of the physical anomalies were gone— his vision was actually sharper than it had been, his sense of smell somewhat keener, his hearing a little better, his reflexes slightly better, though within reasonable human tolerances— but his quarters felt completely alien. He hadn’t been in here in weeks. Wandering around Atlantis felt weird. He still hadn’t been allowed to retrieve his sidearm, which was probably for the best but made him twitchy. It would take some doing to ease back into his old role and pick up the pieces of his old life and get back into his old habits.

John stood in the middle of the room, arms folded tightly across his midsection, completely at a loss. He was up on the professional stuff, mostly; Lorne had been coming by pretty regularly from the time John had been coherent enough to hold a conversation, and so he was totally up to speed and, yeah, more than caught up on paperwork. They’d already gone through and either rolled back or finalized all the sweeping changes Caldwell had made. 

That officious prick.

That officious and damned competent prick.

Yeah, some of his shit had been bullshit, but some of it had indeed been pretty good ideas. And John would’ve been pissed, except that he’d been so far out of it for so long that he just didn’t have any energy left to be pissed. He was far enough removed from any of the decisions he’d made that had led to those policies that he wasn’t all that attached to them, and could look at the whole thing with a pretty clear eye. 

And Lorne had, when pressed, admitted that he liked a fair number of the changes. So John had let them stand, except for the few that touched on things that he either cared deeply about or actually knew more about than Caldwell. 

He’d spent the day easing back into things, getting a little bit of social contact, checking in with people and putting in a few appearances, as many as he could without wigging out. Making apologies, too; he was pretty sure he’d apologized to everyone he’d directly attacked, but he really didn’t remember and wasn’t sure people weren’t keeping things from him. He was really out of the habit of being in large spaces full of people, and he was glad he’d eased back into that. 

But now it was late evening, well beyond the time when people worked, hours past dinner, but still too early for bed. And John couldn’t remember— what did he used to do with his goddamn free time? How had he spent his evenings, before?

Oh right.

Rodney. 

He’d spent them desperately trying to distract himself so he didn’t think about how much he missed Rodney. 

Rodney had spent a lot of time with him in the infirmary, while he was still really ill. John knew fine well how much Rodney had done for him, how he’d advocated with Beckett and how he’d protected John and how he’d just been there for him. 

But as John had improved and gotten closer to normal, Rodney had stopped by less and less. John hadn’t seen him in four or five days, now. He hadn’t let himself look for him, hadn’t tried to call him on the radio or anything like that. He hadn’t really even admitted to himself that the person he kept looking up and hoping to see was Rodney. 

It was a little pathetic, really. 

John sat down on the edge of his bed and scrubbed his hands across his face. Beckett wasn’t there to tsk at him and make sure he hadn’t broken the skin, so he did it again, a bit harder, for the satisfying friction. He moved up and scratched at his scalp, but that just made him think of the way Rodney had taken to petting his hair to soothe him to sleep or reassure him as he woke, during the bad days when his transitions into and out of consciousness had been anything but smooth. 

Pathetic.

But it came to him then that he really owed Rodney pretty big. Maybe Rodney had kind of been in the doghouse with him after the whole Doranda incident, but he’d more than made up for it, spending so much time with John when he’d needed it. 

Rodney must have spent most of his free time in the infirmary, John realized, thinking back on it. 

Yeah, it went a bit beyond owing the guy a favor. 

John toed his shoes off and pulled his feet up and sat with his arms around his knees. It was cold in here, and a little musty. He got up and went to the balcony door, bare feet pattering on the tile floor, and waved the door open. It was a nice night out, the moon big at the horizon and glittering on the water, and he stood in the doorway for a long moment. 

He could walk along the balcony to the other side of it, and he knew Rodney’s door would open for him, and then he’d be in Rodney’s quarters, and Rodney had to show up there eventually. John considered it. What would he say? What would he do there? He’d been kind of an ass to the guy, and Rodney’s response had been to carefully nurse him back to health. 

Well, the guy had no real experience with people being anything _but_ asses to him. So maybe John’s assiness didn’t even register, on the grand scale. It didn’t bear thinking about. No, John wasn’t going to dick Rodney around. And he should probably get off the balcony before his feet took him over there anyway. 

Rodney’s door hissed open and John had a bad moment of thinking he’d done that despite himself, that his ATA gene had gone so fucking wonky that he’d opened a door he had consciously decided not to, from across a balcony. But then Rodney stepped through the door and John felt simultaneously relieved, amazed at his own insanity, and nervous as fuck. What the hell was he gonna say? 

“Oh, hey,” Rodney said. “Nice night, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” John said, wrapping his fingers around the balcony rail. Rodney came and leaned on the railing next to him, and John could see the way the moonlight caught the edges and planes of Rodney’s so-familiar face, his curving nose and the slope of his forehead and the sharp line of his mouth. John had to close his eyes against the sudden, staggeringly powerful urge to put his face against that face, put his mouth to that mouth, to touch and to taste and to feel. 

No. Not appropriate.

“I heard Beckett let you out all day,” Rodney said. 

“And I didn’t eat anybody,” John said drily, prying his eyes open to regard the horizon line. “So he’s released me totally. I get to sleep in my own bed, if I want.”

Rodney snorted. “Or any bed you choose?”

“Not a lot of applicants lining up to let the mutant freak sleep in their bed on his first night out of observation,” John said wryly. 

“You think there’ll be any problems?” Rodney asked.

“No,” John said, leaning forward further on the railing. “Well,” he hedged after a moment, but then changed his mind. “No.”

“Nightmares?” Rodney asked quietly, leaning next to him. John could feel the warmth of his body. 

John looked down, away. “Yeah,” he said. “They haven’t… they’re less bad but it’s annoying as hell.”

“Sucks,” Rodney said. “What does Beckett think is causing it?”

John sighed, drawing himself in a little to put another fraction of an inch between his arm and Rodney’s. He could smell Rodney, could smell his deodorant and the fading scent of his shampoo, mostly dissipated this late in the day. “Beckett sent me to Heightmeyer,” he said. 

“Oh,” Rodney said. 

John shrugged. “Might just be PTSD,” he said. “Probably just, you know, that’s it.” 

“Spending a couple of weeks tied to a bed probably wouldn’t do anyone’s psyche any favors,” Rodney said, “but I imagine it’d be significantly worse for someone who’d spent time as a POW.” 

John nodded tightly, and swallowed, collecting himself. “I, um,” he said, “I owe you big, Rodney.”

“For what?” Rodney sounded genuinely confused. 

John mustered his courage. “You, ah, you stuck up for me,” he said. “And you were, um, you were there for me.” He tilted his head uncomfortably. “I remember everything. All of it. After the treatment, anyway. I remember all that. You were there for me and you, it helped me a lot, Rodney. What you did.”

Rodney was quiet a moment, then leaned over and bumped his shoulder against John’s. “Didn’t think you’d remember,” he said quietly. 

“All of it,” John said, and suppressed a shiver: Rodney was so close, so warm, so, God— the worst part was that he didn’t even want to fuck him, particularly, he just wanted to, well, he wasn’t even sure what, but he wanted to touch and be touched and it was all pretty dangerous territory. 

“Jeez,” Rodney said, “Sheppard, you’re freezing. You don’t even have any shoes on!” 

“I’m all right,” John said, hunching in on himself and wrapping his fingers around the railing to keep himself from— what? Reaching out and touching Rodney. He just wanted to touch him and be comforted by his presence again. The only times he’d slept without nightmares or flashbacks had been with his breath full of Rodney’s scent and his body warmed by his blood heat. 

“C’mon,” Rodney said. “Come in. Let’s hang out. Nobody will know.”

Annoyance and hurt spiked in John, and he wanted to argue that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to be seen with Rodney, but it subsided quickly. He just didn’t have the energy for it and didn’t have words. “Okay,” he said, and followed Rodney into his quarters.

He should’ve gone straight to Rodney’s couch and sat there, but Rodney went and sat down on his bed and John didn’t have the strength not to follow. “I,” John said, “I really,” and Rodney’s eyes were surveying him with keen interest from quite close. “I really owe you,” he managed to get out, and the scent of Rodney’s body, his bed, his clothes and his hair and the way the blood smelled under his skin, was in John’s nose and in his sinuses and he could taste it and it was driving him crazy. 

He had no coherent memory of who kissed who, but when he was next paying attention he was on top of Rodney, panting into his open mouth and breathing his breath, their bodies pressed hot and blissful together, Rodney’s hands in his hair and Rodney’s cock pressed hard up against his hip. “Oh,” John said, a little surprised and frightened that he’d lost control so thoroughly, but Rodney kissed him deep and thorough, and murmured, “It’s okay, I’ve got you.”

Rodney’d gotten a prescription mattress shipped out on the _Daedalus_ , at cost of what bribes and favors and complaints John didn’t know, but it was a human-sized bed, and so when Rodney rolled them over John didn’t fall off the edge. “C’mon,” Rodney panted, and worked John’s pants open and got his hand inside. John hadn’t gotten all the way hard yet but as soon as Rodney’s hand touched him he did, so hard so fast he got dizzy. 

“Rodney,” he gasped, writhing against him. Rodney shoved his shirt up, peeled him out of it, peeled him out of his pants and then made quick work of his own clothes. 

Weeks in the infirmary had left John pasty and skinny, muscle tone gone; he’d lost nearly twenty pounds in near-starvation when he hadn’t really been able to eat, neither human nor quite other, and so he was scrawnier than he’d been since college, pale and weak and sick. And Rodney didn’t even seem to notice, running his hands up and down John’s flanks, his thighs, kissing his neck and jaw, palming his balls and finally closing a hand around his cock and getting to work. 

“Ah God,” John said, immediately overwhelmed; he hadn’t been touched, not like this, not even by himself, in so long, he hadn’t really been able to feel, not like this. “God— Rodney— I can’t— I’m gonna—“

“Yeah?” Rodney breathed in his ear, grinding up against him, moving his hand faster. John choked off a cry and came so hard it almost hurt, shudders wracking his whole body. “Yeah,” Rodney said, sounding utterly satisfied. “Oh, that’s hot.” He rubbed his hand across John’s sticky stomach, then started jacking himself, rubbing up against John’s hip, kissing his jaw and neck. 

John turned his head and took Rodney’s mouth, holding his head between his hands unsteadily; the smell of sex, the sharp smell of semen, overlaid the familiar scent of Rodney’s body, the taste of him, and his body was soft and heavy and alive, pressing against John, thrusting down against his body, and John could smell Rodney’s arousal, could smell as his climax got closer. “God,” John murmured, holding Rodney’s lower lip gently between his teeth, “mm, yes,” and he slid a palm down Rodney’s curving spine, growing slick with sweat, flexing as Rodney drove against him. It was perfect, it was comforting, it was really fucking hot, and it felt like home in a way that nothing had in a very, very long time. 

John sighed, breathing in the scent in blissful satisfaction as Rodney cried out and fucked down against him, his spine bowing in a hard flex and holding position, trembling, for a drawn-out instant that ended suddenly in a throaty gasp and the hot spatter of Rodney’s climax. It smelled so incredibly good, and John licked and sucked at Rodney’s neck, gentle but hungry, tasting the heat of the blood moving just under his skin, tasting the hormones released into his bloodstream by his orgasm, tasting the slow, luscious bloom of satisfied lassitude that uncoiled up Rodney’s spine and loosened his muscles so that he sagged and curled around John, kissing him langorously. 

There weren’t any words for it, so John held on, just feeling everything, feeling the way his brain chemistry slowly shifted as he slid toward sleep. His lungs and sinuses were full of the scent of Rodney, of safety, and he slid dreamlessly into real, deep sleep.


	9. Pavlovian Conditioning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rodney's got a conditioned response to John's all-purpose noises of exertion.  
> John has a much less amusing conditioned response to talking about feelings.
> 
> Trigger warning: brief mention of past torture/violence/sexual torture.

 

Sheppard was painfully thin, hollow-eyed, his skin too tight over the bones of his gaunt face, his lips prone to shading to blue not from chitin but from cold. It was as close to winter as it ever got at this latitude on this planet, and Sheppard had no reserves to withstand it. Rodney knew it was only his weakened state that had brought Sheppard back to him, so he didn’t want to drive him away by hovering, but it made him uneasy to see Sheppard like this. He wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth, either: his tender care for Sheppard when he’d been a bug had apparently earned him the right to hang out with Sheppard whenever he wanted. And maybe it was just that Sheppard was so cold all the time, but he never turned down an opportunity to sleep in Rodney’s bed either. They didn’t fuck much, but Sheppard seemed to like it when Rodney just held him and kissed and kissed him, slow and contemplative and deep. 

Sheppard had nightmares every night without fail. When he slept with Rodney he would just wake suddenly, shaking, and wrap himself tightly around Rodney; Rodney learned to pretend not to wake up all the way when this happened, and never to mention it in the morning. But he knew when Sheppard slept alone he would wake screaming and screaming and not be able to stop; he heard it, once, through the wall, but couldn’t get the door to let him in. The next morning John had looked awful, with dark undereye circles and an overenthusiastic startle reflex. He looked like that most of the mornings he slept alone. Rodney made a habit of trying to remember to ask him over, because it seemed that according to Sheppard’s rules he couldn’t ask to sleep with Rodney, or wouldn’t come uninvited, or something. 

Rodney didn’t know, and was afraid to ask what the rules were for fear that discussion of them would make them change, or might imperil this fragile whatever-it-was that he’d gotten back with Sheppard.

 

The climate controls went on the fritz, as they had this time last year, and Rodney spent a lot of time swearing at the ventilation system. There were two good things about it, though; one was that with John still recovering, AR-1 didn’t have any missions so he had a lot more time to devote to fixing the environmental controls, and the other was that he mostly got to have Sheppard to help him touch Ancient things. 

Today Sheppard was slouching on top of what ought to have been a heat vent, wearing incongruously bright blue fingerless gloves and a matching scarf. They were woven out of what Rodney recognized as Athosian homespun, dyed in gorgeous gradients. He was wearing his uniform under that, but Rodney could see the collar of a dark green homespun shirt peeking out behind the uniform tunic’s collar— a long-sleeved wool shirt Sheppard had picked up offworld during the previous winter. 

“You look like a hippie college kid in those,” Rodney said, wriggling out from under the console and holding out a hand. “The console screwdriver, please.” 

“I’m fucking cold,” Sheppard said, handing him the homemade screwdriver they’d fabricated to match up with the weird screws the Ancients had used to hold the panels on the undersides of their consoles. “And don’t think you don’t look ridiculous in that beanie.”

“It’s a toque,” Rodney corrected him, sliding back under the console. “A perfectly ordinary and dignified toque.”

“A _too_ -k,” Sheppard said mockingly. “Toook! Toooook!” Rodney couldn’t see him but from the tone of his voice he was probably pretending he was a bird and that was his cry.

“Spaz,” Rodney muttered, then slipped and banged his elbow and let loose with a torrent of multilingual profanity. 

“Speaking in tongues usually means it’s not going well,” Sheppard commented, peering over the edge of the console. 

“It’s going _fine_ ,” Rodney said, a little too emphatically, and jerked a crystal out of its housing. “The problem is that last time we fixed this, we just patched around some broken areas without really repairing them, so the patches have broken and it looks like we’re going to have to do some actual fixing because there’s nothing left to patch to.”

He snapped a new crystal into the housing, checked it for connectivity, and still came up dark. Cursing absently, he snapped the new crystal back out and tried another one. “Sheppard,” he said, “can you test these two crystals for me?” He passed them up, and Sheppard’s fingers were cold as they brushed his. 

He wriggled back in and pulled the housing out. “You _are_ freezing,” he said absently as he pried at the cover to the circuitry. He’d have to test it, too— slim chance both crystals were really dead, since the ones he had brought with him had all been tested back at the lab. They salvaged crystals everywhere they could, and all the ones that were still good they used for spares. 

“This crystal’s good,” Sheppard said, handing it back down. “I told you. It’s like five degrees in here.”

“Centigrade?” Rodney considered it, taking the crystal. “Probably more like ten.” 

“No way,” Sheppard said. “It’s fucking freezing.” 

“You’re wearing a scarf!” Rodney said. Sheppard was probably right, though, it was closer to five than ten in here. “This is nothing. Did they not have winter in your cowboy town?”

“This crystal’s good too,” Sheppard said, and Rodney swore as he handed it down. His fingers really were freezing; even the crystal felt cold to the touch from him holding it. “Cowboy town? Where the hell do you think I’m from?”

“Wasn’t it Idaho or Iowa or something?” Rodney asked. 

“I’m really wondering whose life story you’ve mistakenly attributed to me,” Sheppard said. “I’ve never even fuckin’ _been_ to Idaho.”

“Hm,” Rodney said, concentrating as he investigated the circuitry. His circuit tester lit green, green, green, green, red. “Fuck,” he said. There was the break. Could he solder it in place or was he going to need to pull this whole bit out? The good thing with Ancients is that their shit was all modular. Pain in the ass sometimes, but it did mean you could snap bits out and swap them in. Except they probably didn’t have a spare set of this kind of circuit, so he’d have to snap it out and repair it. “Did I bring my soldering gun?” Snapping it out was going to be a process. If he could just fix the circuit where it was… “Can you find the power shutoff for this console?”

“Soldering gun, check,” Sheppard said, shifting around on top of the heat vent. “Aaaannnddd…. Power shutoff… hang on.” He hopped down, and Rodney watched his legs walk across the room. He was sort of bow-legged, Rodney reflected. It shouldn’t have been hot, but it was, somehow. Even with the cuff of a wool sock hanging out of one untied combat boot where his pants leg was accidentally tucked in a little bit. “I dunno, Rodney. The shutoff panel’s over here, I can feel it, but it’s damaged. I can’t really suss out which shutoffs go where.”

“They’re always arranged counterclockwise,” Rodney said. 

“Oh,” Sheppard said, “I know that, it’s just that it’s just all,” he paused, probably making a gesture, “catawampus.”

“Cata _what_?” Rodney demanded, shoving partially out from under the console to look at him.

Sheppard turned from his position at the near wall, and gestured vaguely. “You know,” he said. “Catawampus.” At Rodney’s incredulously blank expression, he elaborated, “All fucked-up.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?” Rodney grouched, shoving himself back under the console. “Try the one you think is this one, I’ll use the tester to see if it’s still on.”

“Catawampus is the more precise and correct term,” Sheppard said. There was a click. “No, I’m pretty sure that’s not it.” 

“Precise and correct,” Rodney said disbelievingly. 

“Well, yeah,” Sheppard said, grunting a little. “OK that switch is stuck. No dice. Trying the next one. Yeah, ‘all fucked-up’ could just as well mean that it’s got daddy issues or a drinkin’ habit or somethin’. Catawumpus means it’s gone all cock-eyed.”

“How many wall switches do you know with daddy issues?” Rodney asked wearily. 

“It could happen,” Sheppard said, and grunted again, and there was a heavy _clunk_ somewhere in the wall. “Well, shit. Whatever I just did, it’s not gonna go back the way it was. What the hell?”

“God damn it,” Rodney said, letting his head rest against the edge of the console and thinking about the repair schedule. Worst was that Zelenka was going to gloat, because Rodney had made such optimistic estimates in the first place about how much work he’d need to do to fix this. 

“Wait,” Sheppard said, “I think I can get it back.”

“This is probably why pilots don’t fix their own planes,” Rodney said. 

“This is _exactly_ why pilots don’t fix their own planes,” Sheppard said. “Good reflexes and great eyesight and fabulous hand-eye coordination and nerves of steel and lookin’ fuckin’ amazing in a flight suit don’t do you a damn lick of good _under_ the plane.” He grunted, and there was another clunk. “Well lookit that! Guess it worked.”

“Is the power off?” Rodney asked. 

“Oh,” Sheppard said, “no, I don’t think so. I’m just trying to get the control panel lined back up.”

“Christ,” Rodney said. “I don’t need it pretty, I just need the fucking power off. Can’t you do it with your mind?”

“That’s what I mean,” Sheppard said. “The thing is all askew, so I can feel that if I think ‘off’ it’s gonna do something else entirely. It’s not psychic, Rodney, it’s a physical thing, I know you know that.” He grunted. God help him, Rodney was starting to get turned on by the grunting. Sheppard mostly didn’t make a ton of noise in bed, usually, so restrained grunts, muttered filthy talk, some gasping, and heavy breathing were about it. Oh, except when he was getting fucked. He got noisy then, and it was so fucking hot because it was completely involuntary. They hadn’t done that in a while. God. He was afraid to ask, though— it seemed like calling attention to the fact that they were sleeping together again might endanger it. 

“How about now?” Rodney asked, trying to get himself back under control.

“Yyyyyyeah,” Sheppard said, “uh…” He grunted again. “Gimme a sec…” He grunted yet _again_.

“Stop making sex noises,” Rodney said, abruptly past being coy about it. 

Sheppard snorted, then laughed out loud, then coughed. “I do _not_ sound like that in bed,” he said. 

“You certainly do,” Rodney answered, “and it’s distracting as hell. I don’t wanna get stuck under this console because I have a giant woody. Cut it out.”

“I so don’t!” Sheppard insisted. 

“Your sex noises speak volumes about your repressed Catholic upbringing,” Rodney said. “I’ll bet you masturbate in total silence.”

“That’s not repression,” Sheppard said, “that’s living in dorms and barracks.”

“It’s totally repression if you’re still like that when you’re with somebody else,” Rodney said. “Not that I’m complaining, I’m just saying, you’re making sex noises right now and it’s driving me crazy.”

“If you want sex noises I can make sex noises,” Sheppard said. “These aren’t sex noises.”

“Never in my life,” Rodney mused, “have I ever fantasized about lying under a console and listening to a totally hot guy make sex noises at me.”

“New kink?” Sheppard asked, voice a little strained. There was another clunk. “Ha! I think that’s it. Wait, let me check.”

“Jeez,” Rodney said. “I’m gonna start making sex noises at _you_ in a minute. See how you like it.”

“Dork,” Sheppard said, but he sounded amused. His voice was strained, like he was exerting himself and trying not to grunt. He caught his breath heavily, in a moment, though, and it was too much for Rodney. 

“Mmm,” Rodney sighed, then moaned: “Ohhh. Mmmm.”

“Stop it,” Sheppard said, laughing. 

“Ohhh,” Rodney moaned louder. “Oh! Oh! Ohh, yeahh.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Sheppard said. 

“Ohhh, come on,” Rodney rasped, rather convincingly he thought, “ohh, give it to me, oh God, yeah— yeah— yeah! Ohh like that!”

“ _Stop_ it,” Sheppard said again. “Jesus, Rodney.”

“Mmm,” Rodney moaned. “Oh. Mmmm! Ohh, yeah, ohh, just like— ohh, don’t stop— Ah! Yes! Harder!”

“Oh my God,” Sheppard said, laughing. 

“Ah! Ohh, give it to me, ohhh, oh yes, oh yes, oh God, oh God—“ 

Sheppard was howling with laughter now, which wasn’t Rodney’s number one hoped-for response but was up there. Sheppard didn’t laugh enough lately. “Oh my God,” Sheppard wheezed, and Rodney redoubled his efforts, shriller and breathier, pretending he was getting close.

“Oh, yes, ohh— oh! Oh! Oh! Fuck! Yes! Yes!”

“Shit,” Sheppard said suddenly, but he was laughing too hard to say anything else.

“I don’t think I even want to ask,” said another voice, and Rodney immediately shot out from under the console, mortified. 

“Ah,” Sheppard said weakly, collapsed against the wall in paroxysms of laughter, “no, you don’t.”

“I, um, just came to check in with you,” Colonel Caldwell said, looking profoundly disturbed. He was standing right outside the transporter door that opened up into the room.

Sheppard tried to stand up, but instead slid over further, laughing so hard he was squeaking for breath. “Sir,” he said, “I—“ and he sputtered helplessly. 

“Does it help the repairs, or something?” Caldwell asked, but his deadpan mask was slipping and he looked slightly amused as well. 

Sheppard howled and snorted, nodding. “It’s not my fault,” Rodney said, realizing he was blushing dark red. “He was making sex noises first!”

“Was not!” Sheppard managed, then howled with laughter.

“Jerk!” Rodney yelled, feeling betrayed.

“Crucial component of the ATA interface,” Sheppard wheezed, trying and failing to shove himself up right. “Fake orgasms.”

“I,” Caldwell said, “guess, um, I should leave you to it.” His voice cracked a little on an almost-laugh.

“Oh no,” Sheppard gasped, “you’ve killed the mood now.” He barely got the end of the sentence out before the laughter took over. 

“Here I was thinking I was going to have to pretend to have been suddenly struck blind,” Caldwell said drily. “But it turns out I’ve wandered into When Harry Met Sally, the Pegasus edition.”

“Blind, Colonel?” Rodney asked, thinking it was a masturbation joke he was missing. That wouldn’t do; he’d never have expected Caldwell to make a masturbation joke.

“If you two were really screwing in here,” Caldwell said, “the only way for me to maintain plausible deniability is to pretend I was struck blind.” 

“Plausible deniability,” Rodney said blankly. 

“I don’t care about DADT any more than you do,” Caldwell said, “and I enforce it on the _Daedalus_ just about the same way you do here, Sheppard. But that shit’s on a need-to-know basis and I got absolutely no need to know.”

“Wait, you think the two of us would really be screwing?” Rodney asked, stunned. 

Caldwell made a wry face. “Dr. McKay, I don’t give a shit if the two of you screw or not.” He glanced over at Sheppard, who was now lying on the floor motionless, gasping like a fish as he tried in vain to compose himself. “I, um, I just stopped by to let Sheppard know the Daedalus was back, but, um, I might just pretend I didn’t find you. I’ll be in the mess hall.”

“I’ll be there in a minute, sir,” John wheezed faintly, sitting up, but when he caught sight of Rodney he dissolved helplessly into giggles again. 

“Take your time,” Caldwell said drily, and stepped back into the transporter, but Rodney distinctly heard him laughing as the doors closed behind him. 

 

 

 

 

 

“You know that I am doing my best,” John said very carefully to Heightmeyer. “But getting me to open up about how having been tortured with a car battery and a pair of pliers made me _feel_ is hardly going to tell you anything you didn’t already know.” 

“Studies have shown,” Heightmeyer answered, “that a carefully-guided reliving of the traumatic event can help the affected person’s brain process it and begin to show signs of healing.”

“Exposure therapy,” John said drily, “and no, I am not going to let you do that to me.”

She raised an eyebrow, wrote something down, and as she was still writing said, “I bet you got that from the pamphlet I gave Rodney last year.”

“He has that damn pamphlet on his tablet and pulls it out and reads it half out loud on missions,” John said. “It’s incredibly goddamned annoying. But no, I didn’t get that from the pamphlet. I got that from the last time a shrink tried this with me. Exposure therapy doesn’t work when you’re still on the fucking front lines, Doc. You’re getting exposed every day. More of it in your downtime isn’t really going to help. All it did was condition me to hate going to the therapist.”

“And that’s why you’ve learned how to fake being fine so convincingly,” Heightmeyer said. 

“No, I actually knew that before,” John said. “Having emotions was viewed as a weakness in my family, and weaknesses were things to be exploited, so there was considerable attention paid to making sure I knew better.”

Heightmeyer raised an eyebrow again. “You’ve refused to discuss your family,” she said. “I know you too well by now to assume that your mentioning them now is anything like a careless slip. You don’t make careless slips.”

“No,” John said, “I don’t.” He rubbed at his forehead. “My dad beat the shit out of me sometimes. Some of the nightmares I had during the bug thing were related to that. It’s the whole theme of helplessness, like you said— nothing I could do about turning into a bug, nothing I could do to stop the torture when I was captured, and after my mom died but before I was old enough to live on my own there was nothing I could do about my dad being a controlling asshole who used threats, deprivation, and occasional physical violence to assure I had no choice but to do whatever he wanted.”

Heightmeyer eyed him, looking soft-eyed and concerned— he was used to her sweet facade, the slightly-husky-with-concern voice, the little line between her perfect eyebrows, and he knew she had a mind like a steel trap in there that she was quite good at hiding. “You’re giving me this,” she said. “You’re giving me this and hoping I’ll take the bait and leave you alone about the nightmares.”

“Doesn’t it help?” he asked. Shit, she hadn’t taken it. He’d figured he could spend the rest of the hour avoiding talking about his father, instead of avoiding talking about the wires on his fingers.

“I’ll admit, it’s something I had wondered about,” she said, “but I don’t know that it helps. I suppose I should take it in the spirit it was offered, as a concession, and see if I can work with it.” She tilted her head, which was supposed to look sympathetic but after this many hours John had started seeing it as predatory. Which wasn’t helpful, he knew; she wasn’t an enemy, at all, no matter how his instincts screamed at him. “If you’ve always been so good at hiding weaknesses, as you term them, how did you wind up in therapy in the first place?”

“I had no choice,” John said. “I demonstrated no particular symptoms, but after a particularly traumatic mission they put all of us into therapy just on general principle.”

“Was this the incident with the car battery?” she asked. 

John had a rule, for this game he played with Heightmeyer, and the rule was that he could omit things or avoid things, but he couldn’t lie. “No,” he said. 

She tilted her head. He looked anywhere but at her for a moment, gathering himself and figuring out what words his stubborn mouth would actually let out. “It was another time we were captured, though,” he said. “I think it’s old enough that it didn’t get included in the version of my file they put at Elizabeth’s disposal.” He spared her a glance, looking at her implacable blue eyes, her mask-like sympathetic face, the perfect little crease between her eyebrows. He respected her. She was smart and she was good at what she did and she was honest and she maintained her silence and secrecy in such a manner that most never even guessed she was doing so. She was a professional through and through, and a decent person besides, and he fucking _hated_ her and would love nothing better than to never have to speak to her again.

“We were interrogated under torture then too,” he said. “What was done to me was done in front of witnesses and left unmistakable injuries and was the kind of thing that even in the mid-90s they knew you needed therapy after, so they didn’t let me out of it.”

“I’m guessing it was worse than a car battery, then,” she said. 

“Yup,” he said. 

She looked down at her notepad, but she wasn’t writing anything down. “Should I just start guessing, or are you going to tell me?” she asked. 

John breathed out, breathed in. “You do know that I don’t clam up because I _want_ to,” he said, a little annoyed.

“No?” Heightmeyer looked up keenly. 

He gave her an exasperated glare. “No,” he said, and set his mouth, squinting as he tried to dredge up words. “I can’t,” he said finally, when no words would come. The pressure was building, tremendous, behind his tongue, but there were no words. He stood up. “I can’t. Do this.” 

“But you have to,” Heightmeyer said, very calmly. 

John realized he was breathing hard, hands clenched into fists. “I’m trying,” he said. _I was twenty-six. We weren’t supposed to be there. They shot my pilot in the face right in front of me._ “Jesus Christ,” he said finally, and sat back down. 

“You’ve talked about it before,” Heightmeyer said. “And it was okay, then, to talk about it.”

“It was fucking awful,” John said, as sincerely as he had ever said anything in his life. “It was not fucking okay.”

“Was the therapy worse than the torture?” Heightmeyer asked, and she sounded sincere but he knew she was being at least a little sarcastic. 

“Yes,” John said, far too emphatically. The effort of getting words out meant that the few he could manage were more forceful than made any sense at all. And there was no physics equation for that, it was illogical and that was that. 

“From you, I can actually believe that,” she said, and she’d gone concern-hoarse again. 

“People think it’s funny,” John said, far too angrily, and stopped, and tried to start again. “People think it’s funny, that I can’t talk about my feelings, and oh ha ha, and gosh I better work on that, and you know fucking what, Doc, you know what, it’s _not fucking funny_.”

“I’m not laughing,” she said. 

“It’s like you have a dog and you think it’s funny to teach him that, that,” he fumbled, “fuckin’, _speak_ means sit, and _sit_ means speak, and then you give him to a new owner and this new owner uses normal words on him and thinks he’s fuckin’ retarded because every time he wants this dog to sit the thing fuckin’ barks at him. But as far as the dog knows, this guy just fuckin’ yells at him all the time for no reason whenever he does what the guy asks him to.” He gestured furiously. “I’m the goddamn dog, okay?”

“In what way are you like this dog?” Heightmeyer asked, far too sweetly, after a long pause. 

John stared at her in flat disbelief. “I’m being too fucking subtle for you, now?” he said. 

“I need you to finish the metaphor,” Heightmeyer said. 

“The hell you do,” John said, and got up again. This time he walked to the door.

“Colonel,” Heightmeyer said. “The session’s not done.”

“I am,” John said. His hand was shaking, he realized, as he swiped it over the door crystal. 

“Colonel, wait,” Heightmeyer said grimly, coming to stand behind him as he stepped through the door. “I won’t put you back on active duty if you can’t even make it through the fifteen minutes left in this session.”

He stood in the open doorway, staring down the dark hallway beyond. No one was there. He really, really, really wanted to keep walking. But he also really wanted to be able to go back to work so he’d have something to do besides sulk around like a ghost. They wouldn’t even let him fly the puddlejumpers, not like this. 

“Fifteen minutes is a damn long time,” John said, hand on the door frame. 

“We’ve been here forty-five,” Heightmeyer said. “All I want you to do is explain your metaphor in a little more depth.”

He half-turned. “You think I’m just fucking around?” he said. He turned the rest of the way, stepped back into the room so the doors could shut behind him, closing off that enticingly dark, quiet hallway. “You think I’m in on the joke, or something.”

“No,” Heightmeyer said, painfully earnest, “I really don’t.”

“I’ve spent years,” John said, “like thirty years—  more than that, like _all_ the goddamn years— getting the ability to talk about feelings literally beaten out of me. And you expect me to fucking sit here and tell you how that fucking makes me _feel_. It fucking makes me feel like opening my mouth is probably, based on a fuckload of personal painful experience, going to get me _beat the fuck up_. That’s what it makes me fucking feel like. Okay? You want I should maybe disembowel myself, maybe give you my spleen to hang onto or something, while I’m at it? I might actually find that easier to do and less fucking painful. Christ, let’s, let’s talk about how the only people who have ever loved me have all died or left, let’s _do_ that, and once I’m really fucked-up on that, then we can talk about how they fucking shot my fucking captain in his fucking face less than a foot away from me and then violently sodomized three of my crew members with a goddamn broomstick and made us all watch it. Let’s just _chat_ about that. Why don’t you make me some fucking _tea_ and a goddamn fucking _cookie_ or some shit and I’ll tell you about how awesome it was when they then used that same goddamn broomstick on me, with the rest of the crew watching. Three of us died, two from internal injuries from that and the other one from the _gunshot wound_ to the fucking _face_. It was fucking _peachy_ , Kate, it was absolutely fucking great and I _just love talking about it_.” 

John’s knees gave out and he sat, hard, on the floor next to the door. “Colonel,” she said, starting forward. 

“Get the fuck away from me,” he said, vicious with terror. 

“We have to talk about these things, though,” she said. “I’m trying to help you.”

“It doesn’t help,” John said. “Talking doesn’t help. Nothing fucking helps. It never gets better. It never gets easier. You just fucking get on with your life. Or you die. Those are your fucking options.”

There was a long moment. “I’m sorry,” Heightmeyer said, and she wasn’t smooth or practiced or scripted. “I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry to have to make you retell it. It wasn’t in your file. I didn’t know.”

John gathered himself, a little shakily, collecting his limbs instead of sitting in a sprawl. “That kind of shit,” he said quietly, dully, too drained to be emphatic, “when people find out about it, they just figure you’re probably too fucked-up and broken to ever be worth much again.” He rubbed at his face. “And I wasn’t wrong about the PTSD diagnosis in my file. It got used against me, it’s just that Weir had enough clout she overruled them.” 

“I don’t know if it’s reassuring at all, but I take my notes in pencil,” Heightmeyer said. She pointed at her desk, where indeed, there was a paper notepad. “The only electronic records are diagnostic codes, necessary to get drugs prescribed. Your nightmares are mentioned because of the sleeping pills; I connected them to the earlier PTSD diagnosis that Beckett used to prescribe the SSRI you took briefly last year. None of the things you’ve told me today is going in your record. I just want to know it so I can try to piece together a treatment plan that’ll help you.” 

He stared at her for a long moment. “I don’t even care,” he said dully. “I just want my fucking job back.”

“You need to be healthy to do that job,” she said. “But I want that as much as you do, believe me, Colonel. We all sleep a lot easier with you doing your job.”

He shook his head slightly, baffled. “Why?” he asked, but then he raised his hand, palm out. “Never mind. I’m not gonna ask you how that makes you feel.”

She smiled. “It’s true, though,” she said. “I can’t tell you specifics, because of confidentiality, but I can tell you about the trend. I have had a marked increase in people coming to me with anxiety problems and sleep interruptions because they were afraid of what would happen if you didn’t come back. Most of it has tapered off now that you’re out and about again, but it’s true, Colonel: people feel a lot safer with you where you belong.” 

He blinked, stunned. “Wait, really?” 

“Yes,” Heightmeyer said, mouth twisting in an uncharacteristic half-smile. “You’re good at your job, and people like you, and what’s more, people believe in you.”

He stared at her for another long moment. “Good,” he said finally, weakly. Then: “Even after the bug thing?”

“Yes,” she said. 

“Huh,” he said, for want of anything better to say. 

“Listen,” Heightmeyer said, “Colonel, I know today was hard. And I hadn’t really thought enough about the fact that you’ve been actively conditioned not to talk about these kinds of things— I knew it, it’s true of a lot of people to a lesser extent, but I hadn’t really considered it deeply enough in your case. So I’m glad you were able to elaborate on that. I still need you to come back the day after tomorrow, and I still need you to stay for the whole hour, but here’s the thing: I’m not going to force you to talk the whole time. We can do something else. I appreciate how much today took out of you, and I know you’re feeling pretty low on that kind of energy. I promise I’ll have something you’ll like a lot more when you come back. Okay?”

John smiled weakly. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” he said, and climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Is it time yet?”

“You can go, Colonel,” she said. 

 


	10. Never Said I Wasn't

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conclusion, of sorts. This arc draws to a close and they're pretty much where they started, though with more baggage, freeze-thaw cycles being what they are.
> 
> To be continued, naturally, in another story.

 

Rodney was in John’s room when he got there. He was pacing back and forth across the room, looked like he had been for some time, and as the door hissed shut behind John, he stopped and turned to face him, lifting his chin in nervous defiance. 

“I understand why you’re mad at me,” Rodney said, with a rehearsed air. He’d been practicing this speech.

“I’m not mad at you,” John said, bewildered. 

“It’s perfectly reasonable, and I understand,” Rodney said, “and so I wanted to apologize.”

“I’m not mad at you,” John said again. “Rodney! I’m not mad at you. Why do you think I’m mad at you?”

“I shouldn’t have— what?” Rodney blinked at him, disconcerted. “Of course you’re mad at me.”

“I’m really not,” John said. 

Rodney blinked again. He had the blank air he got when his brain rebooted in the face of a serious perception adjustment. “You’re not?”

“No,” John said. 

“Oh,” Rodney said, and visibly deflated, shoulders rounding and chin dropping back to a normal posture. He sat down in John’s desk chair. “But you should be. Caldwell walked in on me faking an orgasm at you. It was definitely inappropriate.”

“Caldwell thought it was hilarious,” John said. “And I figured he’d tell the others— we had that big staff meeting, with all the officers, and I figured he’d tell them, but he didn’t say a word. I sort of hinted at it to Marks, you know, the _Daedalus_ weapons guy, and he was totally blank. Caldwell didn’t even tell his own people. So I asked him about it and he cut me off and said he had no idea what I was talking about. He wasn’t lying, Rodney. He honestly wouldn’t say a word to anyone.”

“Oh,” Rodney said. 

John sat down on the foot of the bed. “It was funny, Rodney. You were just being funny. I’m not going to be mad at you for that.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyway, it was actually kind of nice to realize that about Caldwell, too. I was prepared to get made fun of, but he wasn’t even going to risk starting rumors for the sake of a really hilarious story.”

“Oh,” Rodney said again. 

“Caldwell’s not the one we gotta worry about,” John said. “Lorne’s not one we gotta worry about. None of the military here is. I know all my people here, and none of them has raised any objection to Atlantis’s DADT policy.”

“Wait,” Rodney said, “are you saying it’s _my_ people we have to worry about?”

“No,” John said. “It’s the IOA observers. It’s the new people who rotate in and out. It’s the people who seem like they’re cool until they get back to Earth and have an axe to grind. That’s what it’s about.”

“Oh,” Rodney said again. He considered that a moment. “Then why have you been avoiding me?”

“I haven’t been avoiding you,” John said, a little stung— there were a lot of times, some fairly recent, during which he’d been totally shitty to Rodney, up to and including avoiding him for no fair reason, but he _hadn’t_ been, lately, and it was just so unfair to get in trouble for something the one time he wasn’t actually doing it. He shook his head. “You know when the Daedalus comes by I always get sucked into meetings for like three days. And goddamned Heightmeyer won’t let me out of a session for anything, not even if I’m on fire.” Although this last one, she’d been true to her word and instead of interrogating him, had actually just given him a comfy blanket and let him take a nap for an hour while she caught up on paperwork. He knew it was a pretty transparent ploy to reward him for being so forthcoming the previous session, but, well, it had left him rather chipper and kindly disposed toward her. “And then more meetings, and more paperwork, and c’mon, you’ve been busy too!”

Rodney looked uncomfortable, and his chin jutted out stubbornly. “I’m not crazy,” he said, “you’ve been avoiding me.”

“I’ve slept in your bed every night,” John pointed out.

“Because I’ve made an effort to find you after dinner every day,” Rodney said. He gestured. “Like this.”

John nodded, slowly. “I,” he said. _Make myself easy to find_ was what he’d been going to say, and it only highlighted how shitty he was being. 

“I’d just say, listen, Sheppard, just sleep in my bed if you want to, I know it helps with the nightmares, but I’ve caught on that you have these secret rules, and it would violate those rules for you to just show up. It’s like, it seems like you can’t ask. And I’ve thought about giving you a standing invitation but I know you wouldn’t take it, because for you each individual instance of accepting the standing invitation would be asking, and you can’t ask. I don’t know why. I don’t understand why. I’ve just been too afraid to say anything about it because I’m afraid that acknowledging the rules changes them, and then I’d have to start over.”

John nodded slowly again. “I’m an asshole to you,” he said, a little numb.

“Okay,” Rodney said, “but then you say things like that and freak out, and then you run away and change all the rules and I have to fucking start over, Sheppard, and this is why I never say anything because I don’t want to have to start over all the time.” 

John bit his lips, thinking, uncomfortable. Rodney was right, of course. Rodney wasn’t actually bad with people, he generally had a pretty good idea of what was going on, he was just so used to people treating him like shit that he put up with things he shouldn’t. It wasn’t hard to hear Heightmeyer’s voice telling him that he was pushing Rodney away in some sort of self-sabotage, wasn’t hard from there to make the leap of her telling him solemnly that he wasn’t being very fair to Rodney, or sensitive to his needs. But he would sooner yank his own fingernails out by the root than talk about his relationships, so it had never come up. 

“I don’t know why you keep coming back,” John said. “I don’t want to make you come back.”

“You don’t want me to come back,” Rodney said carefully, “or you don’t want to make me?”

John’s gut twisted, and he swallowed hard. “To make you,” he choked out. 

“You said I should go try dating somebody who didn’t come here to die,” Rodney said. “And I did, and it was a disaster. I hope that doesn’t mean you came here to die. But I’m back, Sheppard. I can’t get what I need anywhere else. Can’t I just… can’t we?”

“You didn’t try very hard,” John pointed out, frozen stiff. 

“I tried hard enough,” Rodney said. “I tried as hard as I wanted to.”

John knew his face had gone totally blank, shuttered, inexpressive. He couldn’t pry it open again, couldn’t come up with any emotion to show. His hands were shaking, though, so he pressed them down beside his thighs. There was no point, he thought, to trying to deflect Rodney away. Rodney was attracted to him and wouldn’t be distracted, until he was, and he’d tear what was left of John apart as he left John’s orbit. Because John had unwittingly circled too close, and now they orbited each other, perfectly, but John knew Rodney had the greater mass and was bound to attract another at some point, just by the sheer density of his personality. 

But it was too late. It was too late to try not to do this. Even if he tried, like he had, all it took was one crisis he couldn’t handle, and he was back here, and Rodney was too attracted to him not to let it happen. 

“Okay,” he said, perfectly blank. “Okay. Let’s— okay.” 

Rodney was staring at him, jaw set, waiting for something. John stood up, walked the several steps over to him, and put a just-steady-enough hand on the side of Rodney’s face. He could feel the end-of-day stubble on Rodney’s jaw, could smell his deodorant and the scent of his body at the end of a long day. “The rule is because I don’t want to trap you,” John said. “I’m not trying to make you feel like I don’t want you. I’m trying to stay out of the way if there’s anyone else. That’s the rule. That doesn’t change. I’m sorry if it’s made you feel crappy. I’m sorry I suck at talking about my feelings. Can I stop talking about my feelings or do you need me to do it more?”

Rodney stood up, very close to him, investigating something about his face at very close range. “You’re an idiot, Sheppard,” he said. 

“I never said I wasn’t,” John answered. He was out of words, now, so he reached out and grabbed Rodney’s shirt and pulled him closer, so their chests met, and tilted his head sideways to take Rodney’s mouth with his. 


End file.
